What's Cookin'
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“When you get right down to it,” says Community Bakery's Joe Fox, “this is a labor-intensive business in which the quality of the product is determined by the individual effort of the person doing the preparation.” When he arrived in Little Rock in 1981, Fox noticed that Arkansas' capital was devoid of bagels and the New York Times. When he approached Community Bakery's owner to see about renting kitchen facilities to do some entrepreneurial baking, she offered to sell him the business instead. (Fox also now owns the area's distribution operation for the Times and the Wall Street Journal.) From 1996 through 2001, Community Bakery's sales grew at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent, totaling $2.6 million in 2001.
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| Community Bakery's Joe Fox, enjoying a brief break: “This is a labor-intensive business in which the quality of the product is determined by the individual effort of the person doing the preparation.” Photo by Wesley Hitt |
To monitor the quality of Community's baked goods, Fox employs an enviable tactic: “I eat,” he laughs. “I'm always nibbling and testing — my favorite is our chocolate-chunk cookie.”
No Typical Days
An excellent set of taste buds is one obvious asset in the food business, but other qualities
and skills were mentioned more frequently. “You have to keep a cool head and be flexible
while maintaining a real sense of urgency,” Pollo Tropical's Castaldo remarks,
adding, “The idea of a ‘typical day' is not typical in our business.” He says he
tries to limit office work and meetings to three days a week and devote the rest of his time to
impromptu, on-site visits. “The rubber meets the road in the stores — it's
important for everyone in the corporate office to remain focused on that fact and get out there
with some regularity.”
On store visits, Castaldo puts himself in the customer's shoes. “Is the line moving? Are people behind the counter smiling and operating as a team?” After canvassing the “front of the house” (undetected by employees, if possible), he makes his way to the “back of the house” to observe the kitchen's complex choreo-graphy. Castaldo says there's nothing like a good day in the field: “When you see employees who take pride in what they're doing and long lines of happy customers, it's terrifically satisfying.”
“One of the best aspects of the business is that you get immediate feedback,” adds Pasta Cuisine's Keith Garner. “It's a good feeling to serve someone lunch and have them tell you how delicious it tasted.”
“Producing good food is a pleasure,” Fox says simply. “It's gratifying to produce a tangible product and watch it sell.”
“Consistency” was the watchword mentioned most frequently as the key to success. “You have to figure out where your niche is and serve it well,” Garner remarks. “Pasta Cuisine provides high-quality family dining at a reasonable price; it would be a mistake to put a $45 bottle of wine on our menu.”
When consistency suffers, it doesn't take long for it to affect a restaurant's reputation, he adds. “If a customer has the best dining experience ever, he might tell four people — if something went wrong, he'll probably tell ten. Before long, everyone has heard a story about someone's bad experience.”
Putting Out Fires
So what about the bad days? The business of preparing and serving food is a source of some of
the most memorable, most humorous (in retrospect) horror stories, and anyone who has worked in
the industry agrees that they occur under the best of circumstances.
Fox recalls a wedding cake delivered to a reception with a missing middle tier (it was mistakenly sent to another wedding). Castaldo tells the story of a Pollo Tropical restaurant manager facing down a lunchtime crush with a diminishing supply of bread rolls — the manager, he says, looked out the window and happened to see the delivery truck outside with its hood up and the engine in flames. “He was such an entrepreneur that he ran out with a blanket, extinguished the fire, grabbed the racks of bread, and hightailed it back to the store. It's funny, but hair-raising.”
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| Michael Mack of Sweet Tomatoes, on the demands of business: “Opening one restaurant and opening fifty restaurants is not a linear equation — it's exponentially more complex.” Photo by Robert Burroughs |
Mack, the former Bain consultant, speaks frankly of his “naïveté” when it came to expanding Sweet Tomatoes' reach. “Opening one restaurant and opening fifty restaurants is not a linear equation — it's exponentially more complex,” he says.
Clearly, the importance of learning from one's mistakes is as significant in the food industry as it is in any endeavor. And there seem to be plenty of rewards for those willing to take their chances in a business that is infamous for luring many to the craggy rocks of failure. “It's a fast-paced, exciting, competitive business,” says Castaldo. “It's also fun, because everybody you run into can relate to it as a consumer — everyone eats out.”
“I actually like working behind the bakery counter a couple of mornings every week,” Fox remarks. “Little Rock is a pretty small town, so I get to see a lot of people I know and meet new folks just by waiting on them. That's a very enjoyable aspect of this business.”
