Swizzler: Real American Eats From College Dorms to the District

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Cullen Gilchrist
Hey, Jesse.

Jesse Konig
Hey.

Cullen Gilchrist
Thanks for coming out. Thanks for having this conversation with me. So let's start with some introductions. I'll go first, Cullen Gilchrist, CEO and founder of Union Kitchen, food business accelerator, and of which Swizzler is a member of, so.

Jesse Konig
Yeah. I'm Jessie Konig. I'm one of the co-founders and co-CEOs of Swizzler. We are a commission-based food company that's out here to create easy access to real food. Most known for our first brick and mortar we opened earlier late last year, food trucks, catering business, lots of good stuff.

Cullen Gilchrist
Awesome, very cool. And you make great food, which I'm excited to talk about. But starting off, co-CEO, that means you have a partner in this.

Jesse Konig
Yes.

Cullen Gilchrist
Tell me about that.

Jesse Konig
That is Ben Johnson. He's my business partner. We are attached to the hip most of the times. As far as our roles in the business, we try to... tend to pick things up a little bit, where I'm focused more on the external side of the business. A lot of it's like recruiting an HR, doing some things around finance, administrative stuff, accounting. He focuses more on like our operations day-to-day stuff.

Cullen Gilchrist
So first of all, Ben, miss you.

Jesse Konig
Yes. He sends his best.

Cullen Gilchrist
And two, you know, the splitting of how you would run a company with two founding partners, because you guys found it together, is a really interesting thing. We'll have to talk about more of that. But first, so Swizzler, you talked a little about that. You described a little bit. So you have a brick and mortar store right now. You're selling, what do you... what do you guys do there?

Jesse Konig
So it's sort of like-

Cullen Gilchrist
And where is it?

Jesse Konig
So it's in the Navy Yard. So if ever visiting Washington DC, right by the ballpark. But a half block away. But it is our take on fast food, almost like McDonald's for millennials. If you were to create a fast food company, they would be like bright colors, clean, awesome service. And we specialize in 100% grass fed grass finish, all American classics. We've got our grass fed beef burgers, we make our veggie burgers from scratch, awesome fries, mostly got our CPG fries that are out there in the world.

Cullen Gilchrist
Right here!

Jesse Konig
Yeah, and we're getting our hotdogs started back on the menu over there soon, too. So a one stop shop for all your favorite all American classics,

Cullen Gilchrist
Gotcha. So you have a... and just want to set the kind of environment. So you have a store. Burgers, dogs fries, a lot of delicious stuff.

Jesse Konig
Yeah.

Cullen Gilchrist
And that's what it is. Right? It's it's grass fed. But it's delicious.

Jesse Konig
Yes.

Cullen Gilchrist
And then you guys do more than that. So describe the other segments of the business for everyone.

Jesse Konig
Yeah I'm sure we'll get there. But starting on where we are today, we've still got a lot of the stuff that we started with and we got known for it in the city. So we've got food trucks that go out and do lots of private events, lots of partnerships around the city, and things like beer gardens. Tradition, got a lot of farmers markets, although we're in currently COVID world for a little bit so some of that stuff's a little different right now. We also have a great catering business, consumer packaged goods products. So we're really all over the spectrum a little bit. But focusing on all American needs, really great ingredients, but also really awesome flavor and making sure it tastes as good as it looks.

Cullen Gilchrist

So Union Kitchen. Consumer packaged goods, CPG, is obviously a big deal.

Jesse Konig
Yeah.

Cullen Gilchrist
Tell me about your CPG product.

Jesse Konig

So you know, yeah I'm sure it's kind of why we got into this in the first place. But one thing has been very clear from day one, is that we've had raving fans of our french fries. So it's something people talk about but we just couldn't get enough of. So as we've been building our business and thinking about the strategy on how we want to grow, one of the things we really want to focus on is, you know, first of all, giving people what they want. But also finding ways that we can create savings in our business, we can give our customers the highest quality food for the best price. And one way we were doing that is by starting an awesome line of CPG fries. People love our French fries in person, no one likes delivery fries, or the fries you currently get at the grocery store. So we've been manufacturing home potatoes, our French fries, from potatoes all along. We've learned a lot from doing that for many years. So we've gone ahead and create our own seasoned fries that are at the best, same quality fries that we use, and deep fry our restaurants you can take off at home have an amazing french fry at home as well.

Cullen Gilchrist
Super cool. So you guys are making a frozen french fry. And you're just doing it better than what you're gonna find in the grocery store right now.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, I think they're a great example of our philosophy or we just don't take shortcuts when it comes to our food. And when you look at the big manufacturers, the big people out there, you know, they're optimizing for getting millions and millions of pounds and tons. I don't know how much.

Cullen Gilchrist
A lot, yeah.

Jesse Konig
And every second counts, every dollar matters. But for us, we take a huge amount of pride. This is the product that we use when we're serving our burgers and fries at our restaurant and our food trucks. So we're not willing to cut corners or to you know, take shortcuts that are going to impact quality. So we're doing it the right way. It really, truly is the best fry you can make at home. And when you pair it off with some of our sauces that we make or any classic ketchup at home, we really just can't get any better.

Cullen Gilchrist
Very cool. So you guys know a lot of cool stuff, right? We talked about the stores, catering, food trucks, and we've launched a CPG to kind of bring that taste to people's homes. Love it. What I want to work through is like how do we how do we get here? Right? You've been on this journey Since when did when do you start?

Jesse Konig
2014.

Cullen Gilchrist
That's pretty good. So you know, you know, quick math: seven years.

Jesse Konig
Yeah. That's awesome.

Cullen Gilchrist
Exactly. And so, you know, I want to learn a little bit about that. So, you and Ben and you started this business in 2014, or...

Jesse Konig
Yes, like where we met it was back at... actually in college. So we met in probably 2010. Wake Forest University.

Cullen Gilchrist
Is that the Demon Deacons?

Jesse Konig
Demon Deacons, right. Home of Tim Duncan, Chris Paul. But yes, we we met in college. And we actually kind of started at the first iteration of the business, it wasn't the same thing we're doing now. But definitely got the inspiration, kind of started the first little bit of it down in school. And that helped us you know, make the leap and actually-

Cullen Gilchrist
Why? Were you hungry and you started making food? Or...

Jesse Konig
Kind of, it's funny, like looking back on it. There was always this underpinning or like, this groaning on campus about food options were terrible. It's very much about like what food the higher ups on campus wanted to give to the students and not what students actually wanted to eat. So we were an entrepreneurship class challenging, like our junior year, had a chance to launch a campus.. or a business on campus. And naturally, like the food was the biggest problem we saw for ourselves and for our friends. So we decided to launch this spiral kind of hot dog, fun thing on campus for a few days. We even took it upon ourselves to do it, not for credit for class, but go to a bar near campus and selling sell it there, see how it'd work.

Cullen Gilchrist
For cash?

Jesse Konig
For cash, yeah.

Cullen Gilchrist
Even better than credit.

Jesse Konig
I think this ended up really getting us excited about not only the feedback and the excitement from our friends and people we didn't know would be like " When are you doing that again?" Ultimately, we were like, "Hey, this is pretty awesome. I want to fund this. Why don't we spend a bunch of time doing this our senior year, going into our senior year trying to create a business and make some money. We can go travel after graduation do a bunch of fun stuff." So that was the original kind of inception of the business but it led us to, you know, all sorts of peaks and valleys on our way to getting where we are today. But the first thing that led us to is getting a food shop or launching a food truck in DC.

Cullen Gilchrist
So the idea came from an entrepreneurship class in school. I love that. Was that an assignment you guys are all taking it?

Jesse Konig
Um, I actually was in the class and we'd been talking about doing this on campus anyway as a way to make money. And then it was like a perfect way to get onto the campus grounds. Like we weren't really even allowed to do it anyway. And looking back, I understand why. Like no food safety knowledge, nothing that we would need to actually-

Cullen Gilchrist
You go to break rules, Jesse. Or, one of the phrases.

Jesse Konig
Yeah. It was a classic "Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" situation. We got a three day pass, got to do it on campus and like broke a class record.

Cullen Gilchrist
And you're making hot dogs.

Jesse Konig
Spiral cut hot dogs.

Cullen Gilchrist
Spiral cut hot dogs, what is that? Describe it for me.

Jesse Konig
So ultimately, you'll find our products that really focused on where the youth was coming from as well. But even the early days, we realized there was a little bit of a better mousetrap of making a hot dog. It was spiral cutting them so that you get... we did this math, we're in college, we had some friends who are engineers help us but it's like 350% or more surface area of grill ability onto the grill, which makes us like we can take a high bite of a hotdog you know that first bite is really great, crispy, delicious. But then you get that kind of mystery meat fleshy part in the middle. This, by like scoring it in that way and opening it up, you get that kind of great bite all the way through, more room for toppings. We found it was kind of a fun time later on because we really were focusing on the quality of the meat. And this way we're like, "Hey, we're not afraid of our mystery meat. We're going to hold down we're going to show you what's on the inside. We're also gonna load up with awesome toppings on top." So that's kind of where we got to original food truck concept in DC.

Cullen Gilchrist
A better, a better hot dog.

Jesse Konig
Better hot dog. We call it "Old dog, new tricks."

Cullen Gilchrist
Old dog new tricks. That's good. So, you're in school. Just, you know, you get this idea. You mess around on campus, you don't get kicked out of school, you graduate.

Jesse Konig
We graduated, yes.

Cullen Gilchrist
You graduated and you come to DC to start a food truck. But why did you come to DC?

Jesse Konig
So we did a lot of research, like I think we were coming at it from not really like a super foodie background. It was more like "Alright we started this. What do we need to do?" So-

Cullen Gilchrist
So coming from like a more of a business mindset?

Jesse Konig
Yeah, business mindset. Ultimately, we knew that we wanted to end up in a restaurant. And a lot of the inspiration came from in 2010, if you like transport back, or 2014, you know, seven or eight years ago, this was not right at the the beginning of the fast casual move. But a lot of these businesses you see today weren't out there, you know. Sweet Green and a few units in DC. And pizza was still pretty small. And Chipotle was big, but not as ubiquitous as they are today, Cava, all these things like, especially in DC know of international brands, now, they were in their infancy stages. So we saw all these other types of food being innovated on and we were like, "Well, we had this idea for a fun way to do a hotdog. It's like the oldest food there is, maybe there's an opportunity here." That's kind of where we left it at. And that was fun and unique, it was different. And we sort of ran with it. And that led us into the next part of the journey. But I think it's a good lesson for anyone who's listening to this is that, sometimes you just need to start and you like, learn along the way and pivot, you figure things out, you know. We landed at this great mission that we're super proud of. And that keeps us energized seven years later, but that doesn't happen when it's not like, "Oh, food sucks on campus, let's make something better. Let's make some money so we can travel"-

Cullen Gilchrist
Many steps in between.

Jesse Konig
There are many steps. We have to take the first one, you don't get to the second or third, because-

Cullen Gilchrist
That's the entrepreneur's journey.

Jesse Konig
That's the journey. There it is.

Cullen Gilchrist
So you start a business, I meet you and I meet, Ben.

Jesse Konig
Maybe the lesson in the Union Kitchen level is that they saw... Don't always invest in the idea, sometimes in the people because I remember we kinda got laughed out of the room about spiral cut hot dogs. But once you taste it, whatever is on here, and these crazy toppings, you can taste the difference.

Cullen Gilchrist
Well, you know, the lesson we learned over the years, and I think a great example is, is you guys, as you guys, is yeah, what are you betting on? Are you betting on a product? Are you betting on a taste? Or are you betting on the ability of someone to go through the journey, to be resilient, to stick it out, to do the hard things in the learn, right? I think you guys have always been focused on that. Maybe because it started as a project at school. And you've continued to have this learning mindset. So you kind of new kitchen, you get a food truck. And you started as right out of school. You haven't even had a job. This is your first job.

Jesse Konig
The first job. We studied in school, we had majors and minors. But yes, it's like first job.

Cullen Gilchrist
I'm sorry, what do you, what did you guys study?

Jesse Konig
Um, so Ben actually had more like the traditional business school background. He had a business enterprise management degree with a focus in marketing and I think a minor in entrepreneurship. We kind of cheated because we were gonna start our business at school. We're doing like entrepreneurship stuff at the end of our school careers. I was originally like a finance track in school, and ended up switching and graduating as an English major.

Cullen Gilchrist
Okay, good.

Jesse Konig
A little bit of a twist.

Cullen Gilchrist
Well, you know, mostly most English majors go into food. So it made sense.

Jesse Konig
Yes. Usually on the grill.

Cullen Gilchrist
Okay, so awesome. So you started the food truck. And you know, I was there. Day one and foods delicious. You guys were making awesome food, you're in a great job telling the story, Instagram was good, truck looks awesome. And, you know, I think you guys were doing well. So what were those first few years like?

Jesse Konig
I mean, I think it was a really an amazing journey. And we learned so much when we were first getting up and running. And we didn't know what we were doing. So being in a place like Union Kitchen was awesome, because all these people had all these experiences and we the annoying people in the background just asking a million questions. I remember, we asked some chef like how to caramelize an onion and they thought we were crazy. Like, "What are you talking about?Just oil." But we definitely look back at those times and kind of laugh about them now of all the improvements we've made. But we kind of looked at it as our mini like MBA culinary degree. We're learning a lot about the business and being in it and really understand the passion it takes to run a food business. It's really, really hard. But as far as our actual food trucks, they were pretty successful. You know, it took us a few months to get our feet under us. But, we were there every single day, seven days a week, doing every single part of the business and it started to pay off. We got like the "Best New Food Truck"-

Cullen Gilchrist
Which is pretty cool.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, DC's actually the second, arguably the first, but the second largest food truck city in the country.

Cullen Gilchrist
Okay. I like that. F*** LA.

Jesse Konig
Yeah.

Cullen Gilchrist
I'm from Boston, f*** LA.

Jesse Konig
DC is arguably the most competitive food truck spot in the country. We came in, there's already companies and people there. We actually kind of just copied what they did for first few months.

Cullen Gilchrist
It's good way to start. Exactly.

Jesse Konig
And then we started changing and do things our own way. We started going to universities, different places around the city. We won "Best Food Truck", our second year, food truck runner up, stuff like that. A lot of accolades articles. But for us, I think what got us most excited, is we started seeing lots of regulars. We go to different parts of the city and see the same faces all over again. We're ended up getting a second food truck. We started doing farmers markets, we started doing catering, we started just finding ways we could branch out and just touch as many people as possible in the DC market.

Cullen Gilchrist
And through this, you guys are making these spiral cut hotdogs, "Swizzlers", fries, and veggie dogs? Is that-

Jesse Konig
Yeah, we did veggie dogs early on-

Cullen Gilchrist
But that's the whole menu, right?

Jesse Konig
Pretty much yeah.

Cullen Gilchrist
You guys are doing well with that.

Jesse Konig
And that was the food truck thing, was about being really good at one thing. And I think one other thing that sets apart the quality of what we were doing. Like, unique, funny Instagram-able gives you a little bit of the way. But our reason that people kept coming back was the quality of the food we were putting out. We were getting these awesome locally baked buns from a local bakery really early on. We were sourcing hotdogs from Chicago. We got- when we first realized you're going to be in a very protein heavy business, we started doing research like you would have college watching Netflix documentaries, reading the Omnivore's Dilemma and trying to figure out where our food came from. And as we learn more about the meat industry, we realized how f***** up it was and is still today, working on that. And we realized we want to support grass fed, grass finished beef. So we're going to do- so we did all this research trying to figure that out. And we ended up getting hotdogs shipped to us by the pallet from Chicago. Before we really made hardly any sales, we're buying, you know, maybe 1200 pounds of hot dogs, and storing them and just figuring it out along the way, spiral cutting them by hand before you design the machine to do it. So there's really lots of learning throughout that process. But ultimately, having invented toppings, by being there every single day to make sure you get great experiences and focusing on the quality of the ingredients, we're able to build kind of cult following around food trucks and hot dogs.

Cullen Gilchrist
And I love that. So, you guys are making spiral cut hot dogs. I love you know, going from hand to getting machine. That's the important part of this journey is learning how to leverage machines. But you're crushing it, you've got "Best Food Truck", second best, but whatever. Like, lots of good food trucks and so you know, you're you're thinking about retirement and you know how you can, you know, just ride this to glory. But that's not what happened.

Jesse Konig
I've listened to the past, few the past food founders podcasts. I'm sure at some point, one of the setbacks is going to come up. But I think for us, this was a point where like one of those kinds of valleys hit where we were doing really well on papers and great on Instagram, people were excited about it. But we were starting to get burnt out. Like we didn't have the type of operation that was really scalable.

Cullen Gilchrist
Where does this go?

Jesse Konig
Yeah. Years ago, and we wanted to grow, we don't really know exactly what we're looking for. We're trying to bring on a team and train them and how- what's this supposed to do. Or questioning like, "Does this even work when you're hiring a team is only work when you're doing it yourself?" and trying to figure all these different things. And that's when we sort of had our like, "Alright, we need to figure this out. And this is either time to go all in or it's time to kind of call it quits and figure out how to get out of this thing at this moment.

Cullen Gilchrist
Well you didn't quit.

Jesse Konig
Didn't quit.

Cullen Gilchrist
And so you guys went all in and so you know for you that meant looking at the business trying to figure out "How could we scale this? How can we reach more people?" You've talked a little bit about you know, this mission. So tell me a little bit about the mission and how that helps you, you know, pivot a little bit towards maybe where you are today?

Jesse Konig
Yeah, I mean, I think it wasn't so clearly outlined at this point. But the nuggets were there and where we are today is creating easy access to real food. You could look at a few different ways. Maybe its price point, and maybe it's making it convenient and fun and food people know. But, either way it's about getting high quality ingredients to people in a way they want that, they love, that's affordable, that they can get to.

Cullen Gilchrist
Well a lot of people have done the getting food.

Jesse Konig
Yes.

Cullen Gilchrist
But I think there's a lot of questions about the quality of the food.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, so-

Cullen Gilchrist
You guys, it's quality, then get it to people.

Jesse Konig
Exactly. I think we were really trying to figure this out because we knew like, this is hard. We learn this for three or four years, this is really difficult. So we knew we needed like a bigger, higher purpose to get us out of bed in the morning and keep doing what you're doing. We found later on, which is great it's really helped us build a team and help us be different in the market because you know, where we are today, at the start of the show, is we're doing fast food. And when we landed on this like "old dog, new tricks" idea on hot dogs, it really stood out to people. When was it was installed, it was like something you grew up on and love, you only want to eat today exactly the mystery meat thing. And you look at-

Cullen Gilchrist
How many hotdogs did you eat?

Jesse Konig
Yeah. And we we had people come up to us and they're like "I love what you guys are doing. Like this is my hot dog for this month. See ya next month."

Cullen Gilchrist
I'm more of like a quarter.

Jesse Konig
Quarterly, yeah. Some people are like once a year and we're at a baseball game you know.

Cullen Gilchrist
I don't know the last time that one. I don't know the last I had a hot dog that wasn't a Swizzler.

Jesse Konig
That's the idea. So what we've kind of arrived at today's we want to ruin fast food for people. We want to put out such a higher quality version of what they're used to, that it blows their mind and they're like "I can't eat other things to make me feel bad. Whether it's like a quality and my stomach's upset or like I just don't believe it anymore." But how we arrived there is we are identifying like mystery meat, climate change, people's health. All these things are happening. And even if you do all the right things like "I want to buy local organic or sustainable, regenerative" all these different buzzwords. It's expensive to do that. So as we started realizing, like where's this affordable calories coming from? And we started realizing that like, fast food is the tip of the spear that's driving a lot of things that happen in tech in the food industry and we wouldn't have realized that once we got into the weeds and did this for a few years. But ultimately, we realized they're are a huge opportunity here. It's a big hurdle and obstacle you're going against literally the biggest food companies in the world. I think McDonald's has 13,000 domestic locations that do $2.7 million, on average, each.

Cullen Gilchrist
Big number.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, a very big number. And then you've got Burger King, you've got Wendy's, you've got slightly better burgers that really are just marketing, and it's not really that much better for you or for the planet. So we started realizing this could be our calling. This is what we wanted to do. Creating easy access to real food and starting fast food that's like enemy number one. That's where we can kind of make the biggest impact and create something that is not just slightly better than the other guys, it's 10 times better than the McDonalds of the world. Because you can just taste the difference when you come to the door.

Cullen Gilchrist
So you you realized opportunity is to meet people where they are. And everyone's at fast food. Even if we're lying to ourselves, we're getting some McDonald's here and there.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, people don't talk about, it's funny. It's something like no one goes out and it calls a friend or like tags on Instagram, "Oh, I got this awesome Big Mac yesterday." So I guess we realized like, it's kind of like an unspoken, under the surface thing that's going on, it's still billions and billions of dollars, every single year is spent on. Now you think about how many calories, what percentage like the adolescents or adults are eating this on a daily, weekly, monthly basis is kind of staggering. And like, it's difficult to get in here. We got a lot of challenges to be able to compete with these guys. So it's a really hard problem. It's been worked on for a long time. But we've realized that it's worthwhile. It's exciting, and gets us up in the morning, and makes people really happy because food they love to eat

Cullen Gilchrist 
Well, couple things. One, it's what people want. You don't have to go here and recreate it, you don't have to educate them, it's what they want. And two, you can do it better. Better for them, better for the environment, you know, better casing. Those are pretty awesome things that still kind of meet them. So anyways, you learn that, you figure that out, and that, and that drives you to start making you know, more than just hotdogs and fries. And you guys kind of launch the next phase for business.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, like I said, this was sort of like that low point, and it was also that "aha!" moment come two in one. Around the same time, we did launching a Kickstarter campaign. One of our trucks that like slightly broken down, we need to do repairs. And we said, rather than like selling it or just kind of like fixing it doing the same old same, let's like reach out to our people that know us that believed in us had been following along for the last few years. We raised I think $22,000 or something like that, on a Kickstarter, revamp our truck turned into a burger truck. We started doing a test kitchen farmers market, we were doing all these different crazy burger things that we got lines of 40 or 50 people and it became like a big phenomenon that way the White House on Thursdays. That was like, "Okay, we thought we had an idea. Now we know like, aha, not rocket science. But people love burgers. Who knew?" And then from there, we were like, "How do we take this the next level?" And that's where we really learned that the fast food angle where we wanted to go and the whole thing that led us is really having a good reason to get into a brick and mortar location. Before we always knew, like, "Let's do a restaurant something, a great idea." But it's hard to justify the economics around, "Hey, I'll make a hotdog for a quarter and then going to go open a restaurant for it."

Cullen Gilchrist
That is hard, right? You had two trucks, but there was obviously a bigger market.

Jesse Konig
Yes.

Cullen Gilchrist
In burgers, as you thought, but then you test it and I love that you went to the markets, farmers markets, and literally just tried it out. And people responded. Okay, great. Then you retrofitted your dog truck to turn it into a burger truck. And you kept testing it. And it worked. And so that led to the idea of "Cool. So we've always wanted to have a restaurant, or kind of brick and mortar store. Now's our opportunity. We can focus on this kind of expanded menu of fast food." Awesome. So you opened a store?

Jesse Konig
We did. Yeah, that was also an interesting part of what we had going on. We ended up- we're supposed to open last March, March 2020.

Cullen Gilchrist
Okay, tough timing.

Jesse Konig
Tough timing. Yeah. So we ended up having to shuffle things around a bit and then opening in November of this past year. And that was like, brought us way back all the way to the beginning of opening our first truck. Luckily, we learned a lot. But we knew at that point, like some of the stuff we just got to figure out when we do it or it's not going to be perfect. We're going to do as much as we can. And we'll fix it, we'll change it, we'll make it happen. So, you know, we're still were running the food trucks. I was keeping the lights on. We got this restaurant up and running. That was this new thing that we're trying to figure out both systems and build a team for. We were still really thinking about the quality of our ingredients, we're making our own veggie burgers, we're still making our own fries and manufacturing those. We created a commissary production manufacturing kitchen, at Union Kitchen. That was feeding our restaurant, feeding our food, was creating that consistency. So there's a lot of moving parts and I think we were lucky to have had the experience of running multiple trucks, and catering events in farmer's markets. We had the whole multi unit, a little bit of experience doing that. But yeah, we're still getting 1% better every day. It's one of our core values, it's getting 1% better every day, making little improvements, make little tweaks. And we're excited to really prove out our content of the store, and then begin to open more locations where people love to eat fast food, go to where our customers are, find the place where there's all the fast food people, and give them a much better option and keep growing and expanding from there.

Cullen Gilchrist
Yeah, I love that. I want to hear about kind of where you take this. Just one quick note is, we were talking to Sammy from Snacklins. And he talked about his personal mission, and a little bit of the mission of the company was to make people's lives 1% better. You know, and this idea of incrementally improving things, I think is really powerful for an entrepreneur. You know, for me, starting this business was like, "Well, I think we can do a little bit better". You know, you can do a little bit better, and Sammy thinks they can do a little bit better. And that's an important part of the kind of mindset that comes into starting something and then putting up with all the hard stuff, and coming out kind of on the other end, or if not the other end, partway through with something.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, I think for us, that way we have it today, is that we think about this, like we want to get better as we get bigger. A lot of these companies, historically, as they get bigger, they get worse, they cut corners and take shortcuts. We want to get better as we get bigger. So we're building this into our DNA from day one, we want an organization of people that are adaptable, that look to evolve better every single day. And if we can do that. And like you know, there's going to be a day we miss here and there. But we're always striving to improve that better quality, to continue growing our mission, because it's bigger than making people happy every single day. That's a huge part of what we do and gets us excited. But we also know that there's also a big impact we can make on people's health, on the environment on helping the country source meat and food in a better way. And we can just do that just one burger, one day, one smile at a time.

Cullen Gilchrist
Love it. Love it. Very cool, awesome. Well, your story is, for me, really interesting, because you've been, you've been in business seven years. And you came right out of school, you know, naive, not really knowing what's going on, not knowing how to caramelize an onion. And you've learned so much and you make great food. You've had ups and downs. And ultimately, you're kind of on a path that, that is really positive. You know, you've got these lines of business, you have this CPG product, which is badass, you've got an awesome restaurant. You have food trucks that have been successful, you know, for years. And you build this catering. And there's kind of a lot ahead of you. You touched on this one, you want to be able to open more stores. Super cool. And I can't wait to see that. What I love to kind of wrap up on though, is just thinking about- and I always ask question: like what's been like the hardest thing that's happened, but you've learned from. Kind of like the biggest loss but the biggest lesson that you've had?

Jesse Konig
Yeah, I think maybe it wasn't directly a lesson from the event. Personally, it kind of came out with a really big takeaway I was right around the pandemic hitting, we had all this momentum. 2019, we finally felt like we figured things out, we had our best sales here with our food trucks, we'd sign this lease, we had all these great plans to get open room for baseball season. We had the World Series nationals coming out of 2019. We were ready to start the 2020 season. So everything felt like it was finally coming together. And then literally Black Swan event: the world changes. So that was obviously a huge deflation. We had to figure out what to do. We had people on our team, we try to keep as many than anyone who wanted to continue working, we kept on board. It ended up only being like one guy. We kept going out in the streets, serving people food. You know, it's incredibly slow, you may imagine during the peak of the pandemic. You lose, you know, 99% of your business overnight. So that makes it difficult to innovate and pivot. But I think part of the thing, what's really great is that it forced, more than anything else, Ben and I to take a step back and say, "Hey, we're riding in this moment, we're riding this wave, things are going great." But we have an opportunity to really rethink the future of the business, and think big, and think what we want to do. And part of keeping ourselves sane, we were out at the store, working on construction projects, and stuff rather than staying in the house. Like still a lot of time together working on those things. And we just, you know, take breaks just talk about like, what we want to do what we really, you know, look for the future. And that helped us take the nuggets and the kernels-

Cullen Gilchrist
Feeling all the ideas.

Jesse Konig
All the ideas and finally getting them down in a way that was like on paper, like communicate to our team and the people going forward to actually make this you know, thing we want to create into reality.

Cullen Gilchrist
Like, like a mission and core values and a strategy.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, like some of that stuff was there. But I think it's something that a lot of entrepreneurs run into is like, you've got it in your head and you're so close to it all the time, that it's hard to imagine someone coming in would not know these things. Yeah, you have to take a step back and say like "Hey, like you need find a structured way to teach people what we're all about and what we care about." And someone being like your shoulder every day or on your hip every day works for a little while. But you start quickly getting to the size you can't be in multiple places at once and team building stuff. So that was a big part , a big takeaway and realizing like, we know what we want to do. And we've really refined that in that period of kind of stillness. And we're just ready, then more than ever to come out re-energized on the other side of this thing. And that's where we are today.

Cullen Gilchrist
And you got open,.

Jesse Konig
We got open.

Cullen Gilchrist
Which is a win. And so my next question is like, what has been your biggest win. Seven years, what's the thing that you're most proud of?

Jesse Konig
Yeah, I mean, it's hard. I'm probably biased to the President.

Cullen Gilchrist
But yeah, it should be. Every day is better.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, we're getting 1% better.

Cullen Gilchrist
Right now, talking to Cullen.

Jesse Konig
This is it. We had a lot of awesome moments on the way like I said the celebration, the great parts, but I think what right now I'm thinking about the biggest win was recently we opened store November. And was there as like the acting GM Ben was doing all the things he has to do in this play normally, but also running our commissary kitchen or food truck. So we were a little bit disconnected at that point, I had to be running the store. And it was just really getting into the weeds and feeling and out. And this past May or so, being able to pass off those responsibilities to our first general manager. And shout out to her, she's been doing an amazing job since too. But she came in as a team member, learned our system from the ground up, got 1% better every day, within three or four months, I was ready to take over the reins. We were happy to hand over to her because the big win for me, is like, one seeing people grow is always amazing. It's really cool to see like those opportunities created and we hope to make more of those, there are so many more people on our team. But also, Ben and I finally being new position almost to be spending more of our time on the business than in the business. So we can help make this vision a reality. There's so much that happens outside of the the cooking and the serving plates around people's faces, to make these visions that we have these lofty goals and make them real. So we're really excited to just take the rest of this year in the next few months to be getting these processes, these systems, these things set up so we can have a period of growth coming up, it's gonna be really exciting for the business.

Cullen Gilchrist
I mean, that is really... Congrats, that's really awesome. Like you'd be able to build the systems, to build something that works, to build a team. You have a manager that can operate within that and be successful. And now started working on what's next, you know, more stores, more CPG, more growth. And something that you know, is worth building. It's really cool. So congrats on all that stuff and congrats on what you've, what you've done, and I'm really excited for what's to come. You know, I should go get a burger and some fries and, and this a dog. So thanks so much, Jesse, appreciate you coming and telling the story working through all this. This is fun.

Jesse Konig
Yeah, it's been fun for me too. Come back anytime.

Cullen Gilchrist
Alright, we'll do that.

Jesse Konig
Thanks.

Cullen Gilchrist
All right. Take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai