Steve Ells

“So we closed down the two Kernel restaurants after less than a year spent a couple of months you know, retooling, and opened counter service”

“And so the, your question, will robots displace that? I mean, maybe someday, but certainly not Not anywhere in the near future.”

“In the early days of Chipotle, when I presented the offerings, people said, well, Steve, you just, you're not offering enough to people. They want more variety. And I said, no, no, no, people can make all different kinds of combinations of the base ingredients…”

“By the time I retired, 27 years later, I think we had well over a million customers a day.”

“Maybe it could have been even bigger had I been more balanced.”

“And I think it's like, look, do you want to chop wood in your backyard or do you want to own a sawmill? Do you want to be Jiro from Jiro dreams of sushi or Steve Ells from Chipotle? I think that is the ultimate question of like, what is your happy place and ho…”

“No, I was speaking with Chipotle. Of course I have a non-compete in, in place, but I asked them, I said, well, what do you think if I started a plant-based restaurant, have nothing to do with Chipotle or the fast casual format that Certainly something complete…”

“So Guy, I'm not I don't adhere to a plant-based diet. I still eat meat. I still eat fish. But I've noticed over the years I eat less and less meat.”

“So we do all of our preparation, all of the food prep in a central kitchen, and that will service a couple of handfuls of restaurants within a, Five to 10 minute bicycle ride. And we'll put this prepped food into totes and load the totes onto a wagon and pull …”

“And so where a typical fast casual restaurant might have, you know, a dozen folks at peak period Colonel would have three.”

“We bought an off-the-shelf KUKA robot. It's a robot that's typically used on assembly lines. They work 24 seven for years. They're very reliable. Of course, we custom program that. We use an impingement oven that we took and modified.”

“I just completed my series a round and raised thirty six million. And so, so, you know, that'll take us through the next couple of years and that will be a lot to open up 15 restaurants.”

“One of the problems is that we see extraordinarily high turnover in the industry. I think it's something like a 165% is, is typical.”

“And since we only have three people we'll be able to afford those higher wages. Plus I think our Purpose is bigger than our product. Being able to address global warming, being able to address some of the inequality with pay for folks in, in, in the world of f…”

“While hospitality may not be face to face, With the customers, it's providing a really good experience through the app. It's providing reliability on service times. It's making sure that everything that we serve is delicious.”

“Well, Chipotle, I think Steve and Chipotle really deserve an enormous amount of credit for really being the first national chain to break the barrier that fast food could not be It's gastronomic. There's real cooking that takes place in real time”

“These burrito shops, these taquerias were small the investment would be low the rent certainly was low, and there were lines out the door, and I thought that, that I could make enough money to fund my full-scale restaurant.”

“Every time you have a dinner party, people are in the kitchen. People want to be in the kitchen. And so, so Chipotle was designed to invite people in, to bring them close to where the action is.”

“The menu was developed the day before I opened.”

“Oh, I was profitable in the first few months.”

“So I think maybe he put in a little bit more money, but it was mostly cash flow that opened the second restaurant, and that opened about a year and a half later, and it opened up much busier than the first one.”

“Yeah, 21, twenty-one billion, I think, was the highest.”

“I was lucky to have a father who could invest 85,000 dollars in my first restaurant because I couldn't have raised that money myself.”