Ayr Muir: Hey Chris, where’s the medlar?

These are medlar.

Julia Hanna: Wow.

Ayr: I’m trying to find a nice squishy one. So in... they were popular in medieval times and they’re like, you find references to like in old Epicurean books and stuff. Yeah, you’re welcome to, to taste some of it. It’s like, it’s sort of seedy, it’s not like a modern fruit.

Julia: It looks ancient.

Ayr: It has... it’s sort of like figs and dates. I would say. It’s got like a little sweetness. A little bit like a pear a little bit. We make a jam with it. Yeah, we do. It’s like a parsnip sandwich with a medlar jam. It’s really fun.

Dan Morrell: Ayr Muir always had an interest in the environment. After HBS, he thought he’d find a job in wind power—until a friend gave him an alarming UN report detailing livestock’s impact on CO2 emissions. With the average American consuming 3.1 servings of meat daily, Muir (MBA 2004) realized that food was a place he could make a difference. In 2008 he started Clover Food Lab with the goal of making vegetables irresistible for people who love to eat meat. Now a chain of more than a dozen fast-casual restaurants in the Boston area, Clover serves an always-changing, all-vegetarian menu to a 90 percent non-vegetarian customer base. In this episode of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna takes listeners behind the scenes at a Clover food development meeting and talks to Muir about Brussel sprouts, the lack of transparency in the food industry, and the iterative process that created Clover’s different look and feel.

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Photo by Boston Globe / Getty Images

Julia Hanna: So how would you describe Clover Food Lab to someone who’s never been there before?

Ayr Muir: At its most simple we’re a restaurant company and we serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And our prices are pretty low, so a lot of people would talk about our industry as fast casual. Some of the things that are so different about Clover is our menu changes all the time and we’re selling vegetables that are in season throughout the year. So 60% of the menu or so will change over the course of four weeks, which is really dramatic for what we do and exciting, it makes for really delicious food. Another thing that stands out for people is there is no meat on the menu, so it’s a meat-free restaurant. But 90% of our customers are not vegetarian. So we’re really focused on making vegetables irresistible for people who love eating meat.

Julia: One thing that I would say is that when you walk in, it feels different right away. So you walk in and you see the menu of the day and then someone comes up and takes your order with this handheld device. That all seems very intentional, can you talk a little bit about that difference?

Ayr: About everything we’re doing that works really well is the result of some engagement with customers. We’ve tested a lot of different things over the years. We’ve tested how to write the menu, which order to put things in, how large to make the font, where to put the prices on the menu, and what level of descriptions we should have, whether we should have pictures on the menu or not, we’ve experimented with other aspects of the service model, how we should make the food, whether we should do it in a line or whether we should separate things out. And the way we make food right now is in parallel, so the different items in your order will be split up and different people will handle them then it’ll all come together. And that was through a lot of iteration, we wanted to get high throughput numbers and the model for our kitchen, how it’s designed and how it flows is to help us achieve those really high throughputs.

And some of the customer engagement you were talking about is really designed to help people understand and appreciate all the new things on the menu. Because the way a lot of people buy food is you buy one thing you know you like and then come back again, and again, and again. And what needs to happen at Clover is, I have a Brussels sprout sandwich that just came on the menu a few weeks ago and it will be on the menu for about six weeks this year. And that sandwich is our best selling sandwich the whole year and nothing outdoes it. So it’s the king of all of our sandwiches.

But if you discovered Clover in say August for the first time and then you see the sandwich appear on the menu in October, there needs to be something that helps bridge that gap, and helps you become interested and intrigued, and maybe even try ordering it. If that doesn’t happen, that sandwich will wither and not do well. And then as a result, we won’t be able to buy those Brussels sprouts from the farmers in Massachusetts. That’s why there’s a person we call the Clover guide, somebody there to help you through the menu instead of just a cash register. They’ll usually ask you if you’ve been to Clover before or not, if you’ve never been there they’ll talk to you about what we do and if you’ve been to Clover often, they’ll ask you what your favorite things are and they might guide you to try something new.

Julia: For all the foodies out there and for all the skeptics, I want you to break down that Brussels sprouts sandwich because I know that there are many people out there who, their reaction might be less than favorable to those words, “Brussels sprouts sandwich.” What is in it? What makes it so delicious and so popular?

Ayr: The Brussels sprout sandwich, it’s been on our menu for, I think at this point, six or seven years, it was actually one of the recipes that I came up with, which isn’t the case with all of our recipes, but this one was mine. And I grew up loving Brussels sprouts and when I was a little kid I just loved them, they were one of my favorite things. And I grew up in the ‘80s and I heard a lot of people say terrible things about Brussels sprouts, so I hated that. I didn’t like people talking badly about Brussels sprouts, it made me feel a little bit angry inside.

Julia: Maligning them.

Ayr: So I built this up for many years. And this sandwich was my attempt to defend the Brussels sprout and bring people into the fold. Brussels sprouts are amazing because if they’re done really badly, like any vegetable, if the quality of the starting ingredient isn’t great, and then the way it’s handled isn’t great, it can taste terrible. But if Brussels sprouts are handled properly, they’re really complex and interesting. They have little elements of like truffles in them, a little bit of that taste and they have a really broad range of flavors. They have a little bit of sweetness and they have some earthiness. We have a Dijon aioli and then we have a smoked cheddar cheese, it’s from Grafton, which is a really wonderful cheese provider in Southern Vermont. And then we have the Brussels sprouts, which we slice them in half and then we flash fry them. And then we have some cabbage, a little bit pickled red cabbage, which is a little bit of a joke I don’t think anybody’s gotten. It’s a cabbage two ways, Brussels sprouts and cabbage are both sort of in the same family there. And then we have some hazelnuts, toasted hazelnuts on top of it. And altogether it’s crunchy, it’s satisfying, the flavors are really amazing, it’s filling. It’s a really fun sandwich people look forward to.

Julia: Amazingly it’s kind of decadent tasting too, which I think is kind of... It’s a little bit emblematic of the food at Clover is, it’s much more delicious and rich than you would expect it to be.

Ayr: It’s interesting we get this sometimes from people who sort of start out in the beginning of a description of Clover, it can be hard to understand exactly what we are. And I think partly, yeah, we’re trying to do something new and I think we do have customers that come to us expecting us to be more of a traditional health food restaurant and they’re disappointed and we get notes periodically from people saying, "I can’t believe you use oil."

But I think what they don’t really understand very well and what’s critical to what we’re doing is 90% of the people we’re serving love to eat meat. And I think one of the problems vegetarian food has had or meals when you take the meat away, often vegans and vegetarians eat a very, very lean diet. And I think that what happens is when somebody who has a meat based diet eats a vegan or vegetarian meal, I think often one of the big things that hits them in the face is, I don’t think they’d describe it this way, but the meal feels scant or unsatisfying or people [refer to it as] rabbit food and all sorts of derogatory descriptions of vegetarian and vegan food, I think often are just talking about the lack of fat.

And fat does a few things, it’s satiating, we enjoy it, but it also carries flavors in different ways. So if you take fat out of a dish, you can’t get the same kinds of flavor experiences. And we want to have our food healthful,but fat’s not bad for us, most Americans probably eat less fat than we should and certainly less healthy fat than we should.

Ayr: Hi, welcome everybody. We will get started. So, anybody here for the very first time? Awesome. Alright, a lot of first timers. So, sometimes we have huge agendas with too many things to eat. Today’s agenda is very brief, so. But we do have some really fun things to taste.

My name’s Ayr, I’m the founder and CEO of Clover. And, the way to think about this is it’s like an internal company process that you guys are all sitting in on. ...

Julia: That Brussel sprout sandwich and every other item on Clover’s ever-changing menu is tested, critiqued, and tweaked in a weekly food development meeting that is open to the public at a Clover restaurant in East Cambridge. In the words of Muir, “food dev” is where new food is born at Clover.

Ayr: So, let’s just take some sample cups and we’ll pass these around. You guys can just take a little bit when the cup comes around to you.

That one’s probably brewed too hot. So this is a little bit of a delicate green tea. I can just tell tasting, it’s like it was probably brewed with, like, boiling water and it can’t handle that. So that’s why it’s got like a really stringent, bitter taste. So that one should be brewed at a lower temperature. It’ll probably be a lot sweeter …

Julia: After tea, we move on to hay straws…a product pitched as an environmentally friendly replacement for the restaurant’s compostable plastic straws. They’re introduced by Olivia Kjorlien, Clover’s food planning and menu development manager.

Olivia Kjorlien: A company just reached out to us because right now we are currently using plastic straws and this would be... Composable plastic straws, yeah. But this would be a more environmentally friendly option. They are a little bit delicate and they offer them in two different sizes. I just thought they’d be sort of fun to test out.

Food Dev Guest 1: How does it work?

Julia: I have to say it’s a little like drinking through a twig and it’s very tiny. I might feel a little silly using this. I think I’ll just bring my metal straw.

Julia: And Clover invites the public to bring food they’ve prepared to food dev. If it’s a good fit, it will go into development with one of Clover’s test chefs for possible inclusion on the restaurant’s menu. Wondering if my cooking has what it takes, I’ve brought some coconut butternut squash soup for everyone to try. My husband and daughter liked it, so I’m curious to hear what other people think.

Ayr: Okay, so next up we have a coconut butternut squash soup. Awesome. Thank you. Do you want to tell us about it?

Julia: Yes, so it’s butternut squash, coconut milk, vegetable broth, onion, apple, little bit of curry powder. There’s a garnish on top that is kale and onions. You won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t like it, but I just thought I’d bring it in and see what you thought.

Ayr: Go ahead and help yourselves.

Food Dev Guest 2: Yeah. No, I like it. It’s, it’s definitely on the sweeter side. The smell is great. The coconut and the curry hits you first and then I like the fact there’s always like different textures in it too, so it’s really good.

Food Dev Guest 3: Yeah. Very good.

Food Dev Guest 4: I think the flavors are true to form. It tastes like butternut squash. That’s what I love. That’s good.

Julia: So my soup gets decent reviews. I’ve made a butternut squash soup that tastes like butternut squash…so that’s good, even if it didn’t make the cut for further development at Clover. We move on to a no-brainer…single-origin chocolate from Goodnow Farms in Sudbury, Massachusetts, before Ayr wraps up.

Ayr: ...we have been selling chocolate in our grab and go area, the retail area in the restaurants for maybe a year now. I would recommend starting here and then going that way. This one is the darkest chocolate.

Julia: It’s like super bitter in a good way.

Food Dev Guest 1: I was going to say bright. It’s very bright.

Julia: Bright, yeah. Yummy. I’m going back for another.

Ayr: We’re going to look more closely at the tea. I’m not sure the hay straws pass the test. The chocolate bars I think are really interesting and we love the idea of the soup. We’ll think more about it, thanks.

Julia: The transparent process that is the food dev lab is part of Clover’s DNA. “We will screw something up,” Muir wrote on the wall of Clover’s first restaurant in Harvard Square. Customers can read about those missteps in the “our mistakes” section of Clover’s website. For Muir, it’s a way to gain customer trust in an industry that sometimes bends the truth to its advantage.

Ayr: If you just ask somebody a question about food, and what their perception is and then the reality of the answer. And in our industry that gap is just so large and it’s deliberate, it’s created that way. You go to buy butter in a grocery store and there’s a picture of a pasture and cows on it. None of the cows involved in making any of the butter in our country, essentially live in that kind of a pasture. But I think the impression is created in our minds and I think that the best way for us to change that is to let people see as much as we can. It’s hard for me to say, "This soup is fresh." Which it is, but you can go into a 7-Eleven and they have a little sign saying fresh soup. So it doesn’t mean much when I say fresh soup, I think our industry has sort of stolen the meaning from a lot of words. For us, a lot of the way we demonstrate transparency is through actions and activity and allowing people to see things.

Julia: I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you like this work and what kind of keeps you going, because I know your days must be very full. You must be going from location to location and checking things out and possibly dealing with issues that are unexpected to put it mildly. What do you love about what you do?

Ayr: I have a job where despite all the challenges that hit you each day when you wake up and maybe wake you up in the middle of the night, and follow you around everywhere, I’m doing something that I feel is really important and needs to be done. And there’s just a really deep satisfaction and pride in that.And I think that it spreads, it’s not just feeling proud about what I’m doing, but I end up feeling so proud about the team that I’m building around me and watching their successes because they’re not just overcoming obstacles, but they’re doing it for such an important goal. And I think it’s nice to be doing something that my kids can look up to.

If we’re successful, in even a small bit of what we want to do, we will change the trajectory of eating here in America. And so perhaps the largest thing any individual person can do to impact global warming is to change what they’re eating at their next meal. So whatever you’re going to have for lunch today, that’s probably your largest action in this space. Summing up all of the impact we have currently at Clover, it’s the equivalent of taking about 40,000 vehicles off the road in terms of reducing the emissions, which is incredible, and that’s just at our little size of a dozen restaurants. So if we’re able to scale this, the opportunity is so large, and so I’m super excited about that and hopefully we’ll be able to pull it off. But it’s, it’s a hard thing and it’s a battle every day.

Julia: One Brussels sprout sandwich at a time.

Ayr: Yes, that’s right.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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