CAVA

“For a year and a half before we went public, we did quarterly earnings calls. In the company, simulated, with our investors, you know, they had to do press releases, they had to take questions.”

“Essentially we only allowed the investment banker, nine percent of the shares in distribution, which essentially went to their clients and the hedge funds. We protected 91% of it, of that distribution so that it ended up in the right hands.”

“Best in class brands, Chipotle and Cava and others are in the mid twenties.”

“The Consumer packaged goods, the dips and spreads being sold in grocery stores predated the fast casual.”

“When we bought a company, Zoe's Kitchen, back in 2018, right? Devin Strahan: Yeah, I remember. Brett Schulman: Man, 2019 was the hardest year of my career.”

“Scaling restaurants is not like scaling SAS software. It takes people. It takes process. It's building physical restaurants. You're building physical roasteries. So that takes capital and it's hard to scale these things. So being able to afford the capabilitie…”

“What you don't do is often more important than what you do do. And that really helped us turn the tide in the challenges of Zoe's is when I finally figured that out and we simplified and focused and did fewer things a lot Better. And that helped us get out of …”

“We took all our credit cards, our personal credit cards, and we just pulled money off them. Withdrew cash. We, Basically maxed them out and we were able to come up with that, that money to pay the landlord off.”

“But I'm telling you, we built this thing for right around like 10 grand.”

“Well, there was no collateral except for the restaurant itself, so there was a lien on the restaurant, which, like I said, I mean, we built that place for 10 grand, so the collateral's Less than the loan was gonna be, so.”

“We were bringing an octopus and let's just say the octopus weighed 40 pounds. We would divide that by the ounces that we served, and we were like, great, we can serve octopus for six bucks. Well, we didn't take into account that once we cooked that octopus off…”

“We had a loan for that restaurant, and the bank eventually pulled it because of the collapse, and so we were in a tight spot, like things were not going well.”

“I remember, you know, to his credit, he looked at me and he actually told me that that was, that's actually a bad decision. That's bad. You know, he's trying to give me good, good advice as a business partner already. Like, that's not a good thing to just give…”

“So the restaurants were making profit. The dips, of course, were not. We were funding those with the restaurant profit, but, you know, we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel coming out of that whole economic collapse of oh, eight, oh nine.”

“And one of the things that struck me that really helped us make the decision was that the walk the line format allowed very efficient labor costs. You know, it's the old Henry Ford production line. That allowed you to invest in high quality ingredients”

“And we had two hour long lines and the restaurant opened, you know, for its regular service the next day at twice the revenue run rate of the other restaurants that had opened and the other restaurants all started to grow in concert with it.”

“Zoës had approached him, and he said, you know, what do you think about if our investors put together the capital, we acquire it, and give it to you, Brett, and your team?”

“We had a few Kava's that were across the street from a Zoe's, and we were doing almost twice the revenue, and that emboldened us to make that decision, and take Zoe's private.”

“We ran out of money after two restaurants and our investors didn't want to give us any more money. And so we went and took a loan out against everything that we had worked for. We took a loan against our full service restaurants, against these fast casuals”

“We see Mediterranean as the next big, large-scale cultural cuisine category, and we want Kava to be synonymous as the defining brand of that category.”