Bonus Episode: Josh Sharkey Talks Menu Engineering, Culinary Entrepreneurship and Innovation at ICE

#67. In this special episode of The meez Podcast, listeners are treated to a captivating talk given at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) in New York City between Brian Konopka, Director of Strategic Operations Dean of Restaurant & Culinary Management, and Josh Sharkey, Founder and CEO of meez. 

Addressing a business class with a culinary focus, Josh and Brian engage with a dynamic group of students and faculty, discussing the journey of entrepreneurship, the challenges faced along the way, and the experience of building and scaling restaurants and a food tech company.

The episode delves deep into topics such as recipes, food costing, menu engineering, and, of course, meez. The students' enthusiasm and curiosity were truly inspiring, offering a hopeful glimpse into the future of the culinary industry. Tune in to share in the insightful and inspiring conversation.

Where to find ICE:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Snapchat

Where to find host Josh Sharkey:

• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• TikTok
• Twitter

In this episode, we cover:

(02:50): Josh Sharkey's early career
(07:16): How and when meez was created
(12:00): Menu engineering 101
(20:18): Gathering the recipe data for meez
(26:32): How AI is changing the industry 
(33:33): Why grandma's recipe just tastes better
(36:11): Balancing work and life

Transcript

[00:00:00] Josh Sharkey: 

You're listening to season two of The meez Podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of meez, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're going to talk to high performers in the food business, everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate.

[00:00:19] 

And operate and how they consistently execute at a high level day after day. And I would really love it if you could drop us a five star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast, that could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google, I'm not picky anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support. And as always, I hope you enjoy the show.

[00:00:45] 

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, today is another special episode of The meez Podcast in that today you're going to hear a talk that I gave at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, aka ICE, and I gave the talk to students in a, well, really a business class, but obviously everything there is culinary focused.

[00:01:05]

There were students, there was faculty, and wow, they were just so engaged and curious and excited. And I was really honored to be able to speak to the students about everything from the journey of entrepreneurship, the trials and tribulations along the way, what it's like to build a, not just a food tech company, but also, you know, in my past, building restaurants and scaling restaurants.

[00:01:28] 

And then we got really into the weeds on everything related to recipes and food costing and menu engineering and, of course, me's. And I have to tell you, seeing these students, think about the business in new and interesting ways was really inspiring for me. I just have such high hopes for the future of our industry when I see folks like this.

[00:01:49] 

So I was really grateful for the opportunity. And as always, I hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

[00:02:04] Brian Konopka: 

Okay. Welcome everyone. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of meez. As most of you know, mise is a term we use in the restaurant world, short for mise en place, roughly translates to everything in its place, and having everything in its place in a kitchen is paramount to any success, so meez is A best in class culinary solution and an application for organizing, scaling, training, and costing, not only recipes, but now also menus for culinary professionals. So please welcome Josh Sharkey.

[00:02:50] 

So Josh, please tell us a little about your early career. What were your initial inspirations for entering The food world? 

[00:03:02] Josh Sharkey: 

Sure. Well, a little over two decades ago. My father passed away when I was 16. I was already working in restaurants at that time, but I had to start cooking dinners for the family because my mom worked, you know, all day, all night, because she had to support three kids.

[00:03:17] 

So I sort of fell into it, not because it was something that I loved, but because it was more like a necessity. Then I started to really love it, and I would like cook for my friends in high school, and I inadvertently sort of entered a contest for a culinary school scholarship. I had scholarships for wrestling to a bunch of colleges.

[00:03:36] 

And decided I wanted to go cook instead. So I ended up going culinary school because, I'm sorry, I didn't go here. Johnson and Wales happen to have a very good wrestling team. They're now the number one wrestling team in the country for D2. So I ended up there. While in culinary school, I entered another contest that I never thought I would even come close to winning.

[00:03:55] 

I ended up being flown to New York city for the finals. Hadn't really spent much time here as a professional. The judges were Chefs Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, Rick Moonen, And, I forget, Rocco Di Spirito ended up winning that contest, so I flew to Norway. Through all of this time, I had not really gotten fully into cooking.

[00:04:12] 

I knew I liked it, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. But in Norway, I worked at this Michelin star restaurant in Oslo and just fell in love right away. You know, I was working 16 hours a day. It was a crazy experience, but so much devotion and such precision and such care. I've never experienced anything like it at that point.

[00:04:30] 

I was 19, I think at that time, or 18, and I was like, this is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. That's how I entered the culinary world. And then I came back to New York City. This was in 2000 and started cooking and I spent about a little over a decade cooking in New York City for some amazing chefs like Rick Moonen at Oceana and Chef Dan Gray Kunz, who's very famous for Lespinasse.

[00:04:53] 

I worked for him at at Cafe Gray for David Bouley and Floyd Cardoz. Sadly, three of those chefs have passed away in the last three years. David Bouley, last week. Chef Floyd Cardoz and Chef Gray Kunz a year, a couple of years ago, been tough to, to see that happen. But my career was pretty much all cooking at the upper echelon of fine dining for the first decade of my life.

[00:05:16] Brian Konopka: 

That's amazing. I wasn't aware that you've won back to back contests. You must have a, you know, a winning streak of sorts. I mean, are these type of contests still going on today for people starting out in their careers? 

[00:05:27] Josh Sharkey: 

Well, it's funny. We do these contests at meez, we actually just had one last year.

[00:05:31] 

There were $10,000 in prizes for chefs to enter. We partnered with a bunch of food distributors, and it's really close to my heart to give back and do the same thing for, you know, the culinary community. So we do a lot of these contests. And so we'll continue to do more of them just to give opportunities for chefs to just to have more, more distribution of what they do and more opportunities.

[00:05:52] 

I wouldn't be where I was today without it. So I love the idea of being able to do the same thing for, for others. 

[00:05:57] Brian Konopka: 

You worked a lot for top tier famous chefs and then at some point you transitioned into the operating side of the business. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

[00:06:07] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. So in 2008, I was. Cooking at restaurant called Cafe Gray and in the time Warner building in Columbus circle, and I was in the midst of opening a fine dining restaurant. And then I don't know if everyone remembers that time, but there was a big crash, financial crash, it was, it was a tough time for most of the finance industry, but in general, it was a big market crash.

[00:06:31] 

So I decided to pivot and open a fast casual restaurant instead. So I sort of very quickly turned away from fine dining and opened a fast casual restaurant. in Brooklyn, which eventually scaled to four locations over the course of eight years. And I became not just a chef, but now an owner and an operator and a dishwasher and, uh, you know, accountant and all the things that come along with, you know, 

[00:06:57] Brian Konopka: 

And at what point did it become apparent that there was a problem to solve around the way recipes are created and saved and trained and costed?

[00:07:09] 

I mean, there's a lot of problems there, but when was it apparent that the idea for me was a need? 

[00:07:16] Josh Sharkey: 

You know, I really grew over a long time. So around 2003, I was working for Danny Meyer at a restaurant called Tabla for Floyd Cardoz And in the mornings I'd work for free making charcuterie for Chef Mario Batali.

[00:07:32] 

He had a place in Union Square, it was called Union Square Wine Merchants. And they had this beautiful Sala Maria in the back. And I would make all the charcuterie. Pancetta and prosciutto and guanciale and coppa and lomo. And, and I had this notebook like we all have. I had lots of these notebooks. And I would also on my days off, stage at other restaurants just to learn.

[00:07:52] 

So one day I was staging in a restaurant called Veritas. With an incredible chef named Scott Bryant. But I lost the friggin notebook. I was devastated because I had, that notebook had every detail of time and temperature and humidity and the type of ingredients and the type of curing salt and you know, everything you could, that you would need to know about how to make all of these things was, was lost.

[00:08:12] 

So the novel idea two decades ago was I want to digitize recipes. I never want to lose a recipe again. That said, that was before Evernote and all kinds of things that existed. So it was a novel idea. What happened over time was, you know, I was storing my recipes in digital form. And then I started owning restaurants and operating restaurants and realizing like, holy crap, there's.

[00:08:36] 

Nothing digitally for us as it relates to recipes. There's like Google sheets and Google docs, there's finance software, like inventory platforms, but none of them are for what we do with our recipes for, you know, collaborating and sharing them and training them and putting in images and pictures and scaling them and, you know, converting units of measure and, you know, running low on an ingredient and all the, all the things that we do with a recipe that enable us to produce at scale and produce consistently didn't exist.

[00:09:05] 

So I spent, you know, several years just looking for something. I was, I was never planned to build a technology company. I was a chef, but finally I realized, okay, no, one's building this. No, one's even starting to think about building this. So the impetus for building the company was, I need this product for my business.

[00:09:24] 

I did a lot of research from all of my friends and they all said the same thing. Like, Oh yeah, we use a disparate, you know, batch of platforms to do what we need to do. And so I sold the restaurants and, uh, started building meez. 

[00:09:36] Brian Konopka: 

So, so everyone's heard of the overnight success that generally takes 15 to 20 years from the first moment of the idea for meez to the launch.

[00:09:47] 

Well, I'm sure you're too young for 20 years, but how long did it take? And what was the process from ideation? It's a launch. 

[00:09:55] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It is a story in Mise en Place in that, you know, from the outside in. Looking at the launch, we launched to the public in 2021 and it was just crazy out of the gates, we were growing faster than any food tech company that existed and continued to grow that fast.

[00:10:14] 

And, you know, we're acquiring all the major restaurant groups and, you know, Jose Andres and the Jean Georges and the Daniels and, and the larger ones. And everyone was like, okay, wow, this is happening so quickly, but. In actuality, you know, the idea started at least six years prior to that of thinking about it while I still owned my restaurants and the business planning and the thinking about how to raise capital and thinking about what is the minimum viable product that we would need to release.

[00:10:44] 

All that started at least six years before I actually launched and I ended up after selling the restaurants, instead of going right into building the technology, there was a restaurant group here in New York, called Aurify Brands. And I sent an email to, uh, all of my friends and colleagues and customers, you know, just letting them know, Hey, I'm selling the restaurant.

[00:11:04] 

I'm moving on to build this thing. 30 seconds later, I got an email from a friend of mine. Who's the CEO of this restaurant called Aurify. And they said, come, come here, come work here. I was like, I don't want a job. I'm going to go build this thing now. And we did that dance for like, you know, a few months.

[00:11:19] 

And then I said, Hey, I'll come. And this is just a lesson of like, you know, any opportunity, you can turn it into something else. I said, Hey, I'll come work there and help you build more brands. I found this company that I'm starting. So the agreement was I will come be the director of culinary, ended up becoming the chief operating officer of this group, but I started it, you know, as a director of culinary and they funded the first 2 million of the business through their, their parent company or their holding company, which is a really  large investment group.

[00:11:47] Brian Konopka: 

Explain the concept of menu engineering. People hear that term a lot. What exactly is menu engineering and how does that add value for both chefs and restaurateurs? 

[00:12:00] Josh Sharkey: 

You kind of need to bifurcate menu engineering into the The qualitative and the quantitative piece, right? So we're going to focus, we can focus for today, at least in the quantitative piece, because that's more of what, at least what that will show today.

[00:12:11] 

That Ursula's going to show today on the qualitative side. When you think about menu engineering, you have a menu and you might think about where should I place my menu items such that the customer will go here first, if that's the most, you know, profitable menu item or the most popular one, and how should I call this menu item so that it's the most compelling or what do people want to eat?

[00:12:30] 

And how do I collect feedback and synthesize that the right way so that I know what should be on my menu? That's a piece of menu engineering that is just part of running any, you know, any business. The other side of menu engineering is essentially collecting two pieces of data that you then use to do millions of different exercises.

[00:12:49] 

And those two pieces of data are your sales mix, And your cost of your recipes, right? So the sales mix is the amount of every single menu item on your menu that you sell in any given period of time. So let's just say that, you know, from January 1st to March 31st, I sold 3,819 of the, you know, portobello burgers.

[00:13:14] 

And I sold, you know, 9,000 of the sandwich, all of those become the weighted amount of your total theoretical cost. Once you also know the cost of your recipes. Now, what's interesting is the hardest part about the entire process of menu engineering is you first have to get the cost of all your recipes.

[00:13:33] 

Ursula is going to show you meez and what the reason why we built meez is so much of that 95 percent of what happens in menu engineering has to happen before you ever do that exercise, which is you have to know the yield of every ingredient. You have to know that if you peel a carrot, or you dice a carrot, or you chop a carrot, or you juice a carrot, how much do you lose?

[00:13:55] 

And how much is a cup of that whey, if you're buying it by the pound, or how much does one carrot whey, and how much is dark rye flour versus, versus AP flour weigh? All of that is necessary in order to know the cost of your recipes. And all of that, until meez existed, was done at every restaurant, Individually, discreetly, by each team, every time, and there was no sort of database of it.

[00:14:20] 

Although most people just didn't do it at all, so we didn't know the cost of our recipes. Once you have the cost of your recipes, there's so much that you can do. Because if you have the cost of your recipes, and you know the volume of all of the sales of those recipes, There's a countless number of exercises that you can do to optimize your menu.

[00:14:38] 

And that's what menu engineering is. It's optimizing your menu by making changes to see the impact on profit margin, on food cost percentage, on your total revenue, right? So that means anything from, hey, this item is selling a lot and people love it and we have great reviews on it. And it looks like we have an opportunity to, to increase the price by a dollar.

[00:15:01] 

No one's going to bat an eye, right? You don't want to just blanket increase the price of your whole menu. Right? And you also don't necessarily need to just look at what's the, you know, a cost plus model, right? If there's an item that is very popular and it has a good margin, you can make it even a better margin.

[00:15:18] 

And so we've built this into memes, which we'll show you, but you can see the impact of if I increase the sell price of one item, or if I sell more of this item, or if I tweak this recipe or this portion size, how is that going to impact my overall profit margin or my food cost percentage? Both of which

[00:15:34] 

are really important. I'll tell you why next. But once you do that, you have full control over the profitability of your restaurant. And what I'll say is you'll see a lot of consultants or companies or platforms or softwares that will tell you we are going to help you reduce waste. We're going to help you reduce your costs.

[00:15:54] 

We're going to help you know, streamline your operation. I'm here to tell you today that none of them will do that for you. You will do that for you. Those things might help, but you reduce waste. You have to operate better. Some things might help you amplify that operation with software, but all those things are only controlled by how well you operate.

[00:16:14] 

The only thing that you can actually do to unequivocally improve the profit margin of your business. That you know 100 percent will have a direct impact on the amount of money you can make is to lower your theoretical food cost. This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, meez. meez helps thousands of restaurants and food service businesses all over the world build profitable menus and scale their business successfully.

[00:16:43] 

If you're looking to organize your recipe IP and train your team to put out consistent product every day, meez In less time than ever before, then meez is just for you. And you can transform all those old Google Docs and Word Docs and PDFs and Spreadsheets and Google Sheets into dynamic, actionable recipes in meez in lightning speed.

[00:17:01] 

Plus, stop all that manual work of processing invoices, because meez will digitize all your purchases automatically. And there's a built in database of ingredient yields, prep yields, and unit of measure conversions. for every ingredient, which means you're going to get laser accurate food costs in a fraction of the time.

[00:17:17] 

Visit www.getmeez.com. That's G E T M E E Z. com to learn more and check out the show notes moving forward because we're going to be adding promotions and discount codes so that all of you lovely and brilliant meez podcast listeners get a sweet deal on meez.

[00:17:40] 

Right? So theoretical food cost is essentially like if you wasted nothing based on the cost of all your menu items and based on the sales of those menu items, your food cost is that dollar amount and that percentage. So let's just say you have a 25 percent food cost and if I'm going too fast, let me know, I'll slow down.

[00:17:57] 

It's exciting stuff. You have a 25 percent food cost. That's a pretty good food cost. Likely the average restaurant has about a two to 6 percent Delta of their theoretical food costs. And their actual food costs, meaning if you wasted nothing and you operated perfectly, you would have a 25 percent food cost for every hundred dollars that you sell, it would cost you 25.

[00:18:19] 

Most likely most restaurants have, again, between a two to 6 percent Delta, which means that actually it's costing you 27 or it's costing you 30 or 40 or 50. And that's just part of the operation. Someone is going to drop something. Someone is going to waste something. Someone is going to send something back.

[00:18:38] 

Those are all things that you can control. They're hard, and no software can help you completely control that. If you can lower your theoretical food cost, if you can take it from 25 percent down to 23 percent, That 2 percent, right, means even if you waste exactly the same amount of product, even if you change absolutely nothing in your operation, but you tweak your menu such that you've lowered your theoretical food cost, you've just saved 2 percent.

[00:19:09] 

Now, in context, right, I was running Aurify Brands, that restaurant group I mentioned. We were doing about a hundred million. It was really 140 million, but for Mathless, a hundred million in run rate per year. So with this product that I was building, I reduced the theoretical food cost in aggregate of all of our brands.

[00:19:30] 

We had six brands by 6%. What's 6% of a hundred million dollars? $6 million, right? It's a lot of It's a lot of money, right? So by doing nothing other than tweaking the menu, so no one had to operate any differently. We did, right? We had to improve operations. We had to get, you know, tighter. We had to have better systems and processes.

[00:19:49] 

All of that's really important, but we knew no matter what, that now we were making more money and it didn't impact cost. It didn't impact flavor, didn't impact like the, the customers because we, we didn't have to actually, you know, buy cheaper products. We didn't have to, you know, change menu items that were working.

[00:20:06] 

We just tweaked. You know, pieces of the menu that, you know, in any of the customer would not necessarily even notice, but have a big impact on the bottom line. So that's menu engineering. 

[00:20:18] Brian Konopka: 

Well, in a lot of ways, the recipes really are the business. And to start, obviously it starts with the ingredients. Sounds like a long, complicated process to take all the ingredients, figure out the yields, do the conversions. How many ingredients does an average restaurant, when I say average, let's say they're, you know, kind of the standard 10 appetizers, 10 entrees type of a thing. How many ingredients does a concept like that have and how many ingredients did you have to do these conversions for and yields for the, the tool these?

[00:20:59] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. I mean, the average restaurant has about 500 ingredients. If you have a menu like that, some have way more. I mean, we have customers that have 7,000 ingredients, you know, it's, it really depends on the customer. That's if you have, you know, a group that has 50 different concepts across the country and they're all doing different things.

[00:21:15] 

Yeah. Before we built meez and again, that six year period, part of what I was doing was across all of those restaurants in the group that I was running, and this was me taking advantage of the situation, to be honest with you, it was pretty serendipitous, I was able to leverage all the chefs of all the restaurants to say, Hey, every day we're going to test a hundred pounds of garlic and we're going to weigh the hundred pounds and then we're going to peel it and see how much we lost.

[00:21:44] 

Yeah. And then we're going to weigh all those cloves and see how much they weigh. And then we're going to mince it, and we're going to dice it, and we're going to chop it. And we can make specials from this, but over the course of five years, we were able to do that hundreds of times for thousands of ingredients.

[00:21:58] 

Because there's a thing called the Book of Yields. I don't know if you know what it is. It's not very accurate. It's also very outdated. It's also very limited. They don't have iterations of the ingredients. It's just like the, You know, the yield of a, of a pepper, but it's not super accurate. So I knew that if we were going to do this, we need to have a big database.

[00:22:15] 

So that's what we did for the first five years is we just, it was also kind of fun. We got to get ingredients that we weren't typically using and, and start to measure those, but we just measured and tested, you know, all these ingredients a number of times to make sure they were accurate. 

[00:22:29] Brian Konopka: 

So in some ways there was this synchronicity between you working with Aurify and the development of meez. Because if you didn't have that access to all these different concepts and ingredients. It would have been a much harder hill to climb, I assume. 

[00:22:46] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. It's funny. I think about, well, Chef David Bouley, who passed away last week. When I was working there, this was in 2003, and it was a tough job.

[00:22:57] 

Great crew. I mean, Christina Tosi from Milk Bar was working there at the time, and PJ Colapa from Moraya, and Cesar Ramirez was the chef from Brooklyn Fair. And I mean, we had an incredible crew, but it was a, it was kind of a, like a crappy job because you're working, you know, literally six days in a double, a hundred hours a week, you know, four star Michelin spot, you're making like $4 an hour and it's really thankless, but you learn so much.

[00:23:24] 

And I remember one day I was really upset and I was already thinking of going to another restaurant, but Cesar pulled me aside and he's like, look, every job sucks. Every job can suck. The key is how do you take any job or opportunity you have and just use it to change your mindset to make it into something that's actually good.

[00:23:48] 

That stuck with me forever, not just for my team members, but for myself. And You know, when I was at Aurify, for all intents and purposes, I hate having a job. I hate it. I like, I always want to like build a company mostly because I don't like having a job. And a lot of what happened there of having a job, I did not like, but I did not go into that situation thinking, Oh, I'm going to be able to, you know, capitalize on this by, you know, getting these ingredient database or, you know, all the other things I was able to do.

[00:24:18] 

But I took that job that in my mind was, in the beginning, was just a way for me to fund the initial build of meez and actually turn it into something that I would not be able to have meez today if I didn't utilize all these sort of tentacles of what happened in that group. I was able to build it.

[00:24:36] 

Overhaul and build the entire digital ecosystem of all the software that we used and test thousands of different software platforms and learn so much and talk to every CEO and ask them how they built it and why and what were the problems they had. I was able to use this ingredient database. I was able to work on mergers and acquisitions and to help acquire, you know, companies like Gopanka to the end and the lesson there was like, we usually underestimate.

[00:25:03] 

The opportunities that are around us when all we're looking at is the, is the thing that bothers us, you know, that's in front of our face. 

[00:25:10] Brian Konopka: 

Yeah. I see that. It seems sometime that. You may be stuck in a certain spot, but the lessons you're learning there will reveal themselves to you at a later date. Your ability to play with, you know, raising venture capital and dealing in that space.

[00:25:28] 

Most chefs can't just immediately transport themselves to that world, but all those lessons you learn in that process are coming in handy now. 

[00:25:36] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. You know, even when I went to culinary school, again, this was two decades ago, I wish I knew now this premise more because all of you sitting here, like all, you're going to go start companies or go work at incredible companies and you're all going to have these other networks.

[00:25:52] 

And there's so much that you all can leverage between each other. You know, just having some sort of mastermind group of talking through like, Hey, what are you doing now? Oh yeah. How, like, what's the challenge you're having there? I'm having this problem with this thing in HR. And if you keep this network over the course of, you know, 20 years, You know, someone here is going to start a billion dollar company.

[00:26:12]

Someone here is going to be working for the other billion dollar company and all of these things, you know, it takes time, but this network is huge. And to have that opportunity, like you learn a lot, obviously in this class, but just the, the network of the students is, is huge 

[00:26:26] Brian Konopka: 

To keep each other's email addresses, okay.

[00:26:29] Josh Sharkey: 

We use email anymore. Is it like WhatsApp or I don't know, I don't know anymore. 

[00:26:32] Brian Konopka: 

So meez is, you know, very futuristic. It took us from the sort of index card into the future. What are you projecting now with artificial intelligence and these aggregate of large language models? What is that going to do to the recipe space, if anything?

[00:26:53] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, I think the thing that it won't do is there's this notion of, I can go ask chat GPT. Like to make me a recipe and that recipe will work. I think anybody that cooks knows that there's so, if you just like blindly repeated a recipe that chat GPT gave you one in 10 times, it might kind of work. But generally speaking, I think that's an incredibly difficult challenge that, you know, that I don't see how it can happen.

[00:27:24] 

And we get asked it a lot. I think that the thing that the most important and most valuable asset, as think about deploying AI is what's the corpus of data that you have. That you can leverage to like generate, you know, asymmetrical outputs, right? Meaning, you know, if you have in our case, let's say we have all of this ingredient data, right?

[00:27:47] 

Like all the units of unit measure conversion, that's great. But when you couple that with your personal sales mix data, and then you couple that with. The other businesses in your area that have similar products and the sales mix of those companies, and you have the sales volume of those companies. And then you also then can ingest the customer insights and reviews from Yelp or from Tattl or other companies like that.

[00:28:15]  

And you start to ingest that. Then this menu engineering experience becomes, well, just so much more of a give than a receive. Meaning. Instead of you looking at your menu and identifying opportunities for improvement, we tell you, you should increase the price of this Portobello burger, because there's seven other burgers in your area, you're the lowest price, it's a great margin, you've increased sales over the last seven months of this thing, there's been zero feedback from Yelp, this, So increase this by, you know, 87 cents and you're going to make an additional 400,000 this year.

[00:28:54] 

This sauce, it looks like, you know, you've gotten feedback from your, from your team that it comes back, you know, half empty, but it's never finished completely. You can reduce, reduce the portion size of this and an aggregate of the next year, that'll save you 72,000. It looks like you're buying, you know, 200,000 pounds of quinoa a year, and you're paying this, right?

[00:29:14] 

The average person is paying this much in your market for this. If you ask your vendor for a 10 cent discount, 10 cents, you'll make another. And this is a live, by the way, this is happening with our restaurants. You'll save 97,000 per location. This is the kind of stuff that we can do now because we have this data.

[00:29:32] 

So what's the most important thing with AI? Independent of like productivity is obviously a ton of things that we can do just with productivity is becoming a more efficient company, which helps us to keep our prices, you know, low is when you have a really powerful corpus of data that becomes more powerful, the more people involved in that corpus of data, then you have some really, really, really helpful insights for, for businesses.

[00:29:57] Brian Konopka: 

Okay. So once we. Once we optimize the recipes, at some point, if everyone has access to the same tool, maybe there's an even playing field. And then what gives someone the competitive advantage? I always thought it had something to do with your ability to make things that were craveable, right? So craveability ultimately comes down to a recipe, but then there's some other esoteric factor that some chefs have.

[00:30:27] 

Have we identified what part of the recipe that is? Is it? 

[00:30:31] Josh Sharkey: 

There's a lot of scientific, you know, information around flavor profiles and what things, you know, what salinity level and sweetness level will create, you know, craveability. Companies like Kraft and Mars are way better than that, than, than Chefs are.

[00:30:45] 

I think there's a couple of things. One, the whole purpose Building products like this, independent of just meez, but a building technology and also the purpose of commoditizing information today. You can find so much more stuff online than you could 10 years ago, right? The purpose of this is that the standard becomes higher, right?

[00:31:08] 

So the standard of quality now versus 10 years ago is just higher. The expectation is higher. People can do better. They can do more. Chefs can cook, you know, more effectively. So if everybody's in the same playing field, it's now just a better playing field in terms of how to compete, you know, at least in the food business, but I think it's really in any business, you have to create delicious food, your product has to be great.

[00:31:35] 

We know that that's a table stake. You have to have great service. That's a table stake. That actually most of the time can outweigh. Product that's not amazing. If you have incredible service, just ask Will Guidara, right? I don't know if he's been here, but like, maybe we'll do our podcast here with him. But you know, service can outweigh food a lot.

[00:31:55] 

So, you know, service is also a product, right? Like how you do that is important. At the end of the day, the only thing that helps one business have a competitive moat over another business, once those table stakes are met, right? Where everybody, like all the businesses that have really great product and really great service,

[00:32:13] 

is what's your brand equity? Why do people go to your business? No one, that's a whole separate, you know, class, I think, and a whole separate, you know, methodology. But, you know, creating a brand, creating a reason why people, you know, choose to go to your business, that's, that's the most important part. And that has to start from day one.

[00:32:32] 

Why did you start this business? What's the, what's the vision that you have for the future? And there are enough people that, that believe in that same vision that can follow you. You know, Apple and Microsoft don't. Sell different products. They have the same exact product. You might have a different lens person's a PC person.

[00:32:48] 

One person's a Mac person, but there's, you know, Apple will never talk about how many gigabytes is in a computer. You know, Apple is selling freedom, freedom to design, you know, freedom to create Microsoft is selling something very different. They both have very incredible products, right? It's the same thing in a restaurant.

[00:33:07] 

You know, you have a delicious. you know, steak au poivre here and you have a delicious steak au poivre there. Why does someone go to this restaurant versus another restaurant? Well, if you both have a really delicious steak and you both have really good service, people go to one versus the other because they believe they feel some sort of connection to this one versus another one.

[00:33:28] 

I can't help with that, by the way. What I can, what I think we can do is help everybody raise the bar. 

[00:33:33] Brian Konopka: 

You may have already answered this question in part, but because you arguably know more about recipes and recipe creation than anyone else on the planet, I have to ask you this. Why do you think grandma's recipe just tastes better?

[00:33:53] Josh Sharkey: 

It's a great question and it goes back to what we were just talking about. You know, it doesn't taste better when you make your grandma's recipe. It tastes better when she makes it for you, right? And part of that is the emotion you have when you're sitting down next to her. Like, we all know when you're sitting down, like, with your family, eating, you're not scrutinizing that that brunoise is a perfect cut.

[00:34:15] 

You're not scrutinizing that the viscosity of this thing is, you're, like, there's an energy there. There's a reason why, you know, you're sitting down with your grandmother and your, and your daughter or your, or your, or your mom, And that's a part of that, of that same feeling of that, of that energy. Now, what I will say to sort of tie this into recipes, because obviously it's a part, it's a big part of what we do is yeah, the recipe is the nucleus of the business, right?

[00:34:40] 

Like that is everything else, you know, in a business stems from that, the cost of the goods in your business and how you service people and your, like what your brand stands for and things like that. But. If you don't have a recipe, you can't run a business. We actually don't hear it that often anymore.

[00:34:55] 

But when you hear, we would hear when we first started launching these, we don't use recipes or we don't write it down. Good for you. Do you want to like be in front of the stove? until you're 90 years old yourself and not have a team, then that's fine. You can do that. And actually that would work fine.

[00:35:14] 

And if that's all you want to do, I think that's a really great, you know, that's a really great approach. And I dream of Jiro. That's a, you know, that's probably, he probably doesn't have recipes, but if you want to have the freedom to grow and scale and be home for, you know, the holidays and you want to be able to, you know, like have upward mobility for your team and you want to like set everybody up for success, the recipe is imperative and recipes aren't.

[00:35:38] 

Implicit. They're explicit. You know, your grandmother has a recipe that is, even though it's, you know, just a handwritten thing, she's usually writing some notes in there that are kind of important, that are, that seem innocuous, because she's not writing the methodical steps, you know, she's saying some random thing about like this, use this type of pan or something.

[00:35:57] 

But that's our job with our recipes and with any process is just be incredibly explicit with exactly how you want that thing to be done, because you should never assume that anybody just knows what's in your mind. 

[00:36:11] Brian Konopka: 

Whether being a chef or, or an entrepreneur in the restaurant business, these are very time consuming, emotional, emotionally draining tasks.

[00:36:23] 

Is there any way to balance work with a family life? I know you have young children, any tips for how to balance those two things? The buckets of life. It's a tough one. 

[00:36:35] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah, I have two kids, two year old and a four year old, and a wife. Forget that sometimes, you know, you're like, you find all the time for your children and your work and it's like, oh yeah.

[00:36:44] 

when’s date night? you know, that's important to the tip I give everybody. And it's also now this, I feel like I need to get paid by this company. Cause I talk about it all the time because there's an app called reclaim that I use. But my belief is if it's not in your calendar, it's not happening. So if you look at my calendar, one, you, you would get really anxious because it's just this crazy amalgamation of everything you can think of, but there is a block for, you You know, kid time and a block for coffee with my wife and a block for a five minute block for personal check in to just stop and say, how, how am I doing?

[00:37:19] 

There's a block for all of those things. And it's in my calendar. And my assistant also is like helpful in making sure that like these things are always there. The app that I use now, it's called reclaim, check it out. You can create these habits and no matter what, they always be there. are in your calendar, no matter what, no matter who books time on your calendar.

[00:37:40] 

So I have a block for strategy, two hours a day, at least twice a week. And that block can change, you know, now some things don't change like the kid time, because they get home at a certain time. But I find the only way to really balance is, you know, in the same way that you think about a to do list. If you have a to do list, that's 50 things.

[00:37:59] 

And those 50 things in aggregate equate to 90 hours of work and you only have 70 hours of work in your week. It's not getting done. So that task should be in your calendar. In the same way that like, you know, if you're gonna get a haircut or you're gonna, you know, go on a date, it has to go on your calendar.

[00:38:17] 

The added benefit is my wife sees my calendar. And so she knows when, you know, I'm away. She knows when, like, we're going to have a date night. She can ask, you know, Maria to put some time in for me, which she did today. So the calendar, that's my, that's my tip. 

[00:38:32] Brian Konopka: 

Reclaim is a great, it's a great tip. I'm wondering also for entrepreneurs that are starting out still in culinary school, looking to plot their moves through their career.

[00:38:45] 

What are either the best pieces of advice that you've gotten or ones that you would pass on to new entrepreneurs? 

[00:38:52] Josh Sharkey: 

Yeah. So, you know, what's funny is I think about this more today than I did 10, 15 years ago. And I wish, and I wish I had thought about more today's. I think the most important thing is think about what is a problem that you would love to solve, and then try to measure how big that problem actually is.

[00:39:15] 

Because there's a direct correlation between the size of the problem that you want to solve and the type of business and the amount of revenue that can be generated from that business, and the amount of time that you should spend on that business. So the bigger the problem, the more opportunity there is, and also the more challenge that there is.

[00:39:35] 

The smaller the problem, the less opportunity, but also less, less challenged. A good example is SpaceX, right? You know, that is a very big problem to solve, right? You have to, you're trying to get people to the, to the moon, right? Incredibly challenging, hundreds of millions of dollars and time and, and effort, and, you know, there's also Blue Origin.

[00:39:58] 

There's also, there's all these, you know, that is a very, very big problem to solve. And I use this only for sort of being relative to when you're building a company is the most important thing is that you have a team that believes in the vision of what you're trying to do. That when you talk about why this is important, that they get excited.

[00:40:21] 

Now, it doesn't need to be rockets, you know, for us, it's, we want to help culinary professionals scale their vision. We want to help them scale their business. We want to help them scale their team. That's so important to us, right? We want to bridge creativity and profitability. That's the problem that we're trying to solve.

[00:40:38] 

And it's a big enough problem. It's a, it's a big market. Obviously, like there's a, the food world is big, but if you don't know the problem that you want to solve. And you don't feel like it's compelling enough that you can communicate that to a group of people that are going to become your team, you should brainstorm a little bit more.

[00:40:55] 

Like what would be a bigger version of that problem or a different problem? Because you're likely going to spend a lot of time and energy and heartache on that business. And you want to make sure that it's something that, you know, on year five, six, seven, eight, nine, you're still very compelled to continue doing it.

[00:41:12] Brian Konopka: 

We all have to find worthwhile problems to solve. Let's give Josh a round of applause.

[00:41:20] Josh Sharkey: 

Thanks for tuning into The meez Podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, Fresh Daily. For show notes and more, Visit getmeez.com/podcast. That's G E T M double easy. com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it. If you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating, wherever you listen to your podcasts, keep innovating, don't settle, make today a little bit better than yesterday.

[00:41:48]

And remember it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.