Restaurant Reset

Jennifer Dodd took over Main Squeeze Juice Co in 2024 walking into a brand where franchisee trust had been obliterated. Four months later sales were up 35%, and they held it for over a year without a single base price increase. She walks Andy through how she rebuilt that trust, the demographic patterns she has been reading since 2007, and why she believes the competition restaurant operators should fear is the convenience store down the road.In this episode:• (01:02) The red mop wig outside a Wendy's at 15, and the microbiology student who already understood why food changes people• (08:16) Taking over a brand with fractured franchisee trust, and what she actually did in the first 30 days• (12:18) Why she paid for the digital menu boards and the installation herself, and asked franchisees for nothing but the space• (16:58) A 35% sales lift in four months, sustained for over a year, with no increase to base prices• (18:19) Why a thirty-store brand runs its own production, inventory, and loyalty software in house• (23:36) The 2007 statistic about working mothers that told her the modern restaurant industry had already been built• (27:29) How that same pattern-reading led her to call functional wellness years before it exploded• (30:15) Why she thinks convenience stores, with the best real estate in the country, are the threat operators are not watching• (33:44) The trend she says will age badly, and the D-Day weather story she uses to explain what AI cannot see• (42:15) Her closing advice for future leaders, starting with a Theodore Roosevelt line about how mediocrity actually happensSubscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Joseph Szala has publicly graded three restaurant rebrands. Domino's worked. Long John Silver's worked. Cracker Barrel did not. His read is that the logos had almost nothing to do with any of it. Cracker Barrel sterilized the interiors, lost the rocking chairs and the old man on the sign, then let a rebrand take the blame for a shift that was already underway. Domino's ran an ad where the CEO admitted the pizza was bad and promised to fix it, and bought itself years of goodwill in the process.This week, Andy sits down with Joseph Szala, who has spent almost twenty years pointed at restaurants, most of it talking operators out of the thing they came to buy. He founded the branding agency Vigor in 2003, narrowed it to restaurants only, and sold it in 2021 after eighteen years. Today he is Partner and VP at 3Owl, which builds websites and digital ordering for around fifty multi-unit brands, and he runs his own branding studio, Bullhearted. He has written five books, including Mass Behaving on brand archetypes, now in its second edition, and Quiet Killers, which he says is the reason he wanted to come on this show.He sits on the brand side and the commerce side of the same problem, which means he has watched brands buy a rebrand to avoid fixing the kitchen and buy a platform to avoid fixing the org chart. His answer to the question every struggling operator eventually asks, is a rebrand going to fix this, is the most useful thing in this conversation.In this episode:• What losing the rights to his old blog in the Vigor sale taught him about which parts of a brand are worth fighting for• Why a rebrand is almost never the fix for a failing brand, and what actually is• Cracker Barrel vs. Domino's vs. Long John Silver: what separated the rebrand that backfired from the ones that worked• "Slop is human": what AI-generated content reveals about the quality control we were already skipping• The math he ran on the AI-designed barbershop flyer everyone was mad about• Who should own brand voice when the order-taker is a language model• Survivorship bias, siloed teams, and why he would put "tech" at the end of every C-title• Why the digital guest experience is the most important thing a restaurant brand sells, and still gets treated like a brochure websiteSubscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.Timestamps:00:00 Intro02:41 The name he did not mean to let go of04:41 Why he now thinks the name sucked05:58 Is a rebrand ever the actual fix?06:56 What is usually wrong instead08:37 Branding is shared by everyone in the organization09:12 Three rebrands, and what separated them10:40 What Domino's got right12:39 Cracker Barrel, the interiors, and the rocking chairs14:29 Survivorship bias and the copycat problem16:17 Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM17:57 How restaurant tech stacks actually get chosen18:55 What happens when leaders take the vendor's number at face value21:59 Buying tech that scales with the next 25 units23:48 AI as an accelerator, not a solution27:34 The barbershop flyer math29:38 Where he will not let AI near the numbers35:51 When your order-taker is a language model39:59 What to audit first45:59 Why he would put tech at the end of every C-title47:07 The digital guest experience, and the lift brands leave on the table

Suzie Tsai runs one of the fastest-growing Korean fried chicken brands in America, and most days her job is saying no. Bonchon's CEO walks Andy through the filter she runs every decision through, from franchise deals to vendor pitches, and why patience beats urgency almost every time.In this episode:(03:52) Why her first official act as CEO was restoring two Korean characters to the Bonchon logo(14:03) Why she came up through consumer insights instead of ops or finance(15:59) What a thousand hours of listening to guests reveals that operators consistently get wrong(24:37) The decision filter she applies to franchise candidates whose financials are flawless but whose answer to "why Bonchon?" is only about the economics(27:42) Deals she personally signed off on and now questions ("who approved this?" It was her)(33:41) Why the fastest way to lose her in a pitch meeting is leading with technology instead of the problem(34:07) Her blunt verdict on most vendor pitches: restaurants don't need more technology, they need fewer friction points(46:08) How "main and main" real estate, not Asian trade districts, became Bonchon's growth playbook in small-town AmericaSubscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

A guest ordered mac and cheese from California Pizza Kitchen, got a container of cheese sauce with no noodles, and posted it to TikTok. Within days it was everywhere. CPK's answer wasn't a statement from corporate it was their head of culinary, mid-photo-shoot and openly annoyed, being handed an iPhone and told to film a deadpan training video teaching his own cooks how to make it right. The punchline: because one guest got half a mac and cheese, everyone got half off mac and cheese. The video passed 12 million views and over a million likes, and doubled the brand's social following.Paul Pszybylski is the man in that video, and only the third person ever to run culinary at CPK in 41 years. He came to it sideways dropping out of college for a line cook job in the French Quarter, Le Cordon Bleu, pastry under Wolfgang Puck at Spago Chicago for $8 an hour, then a decade in Kraft's Glenview test kitchen developing everything from salad dressings to Oreos to the CPK frozen pizzas he'd eventually inherit from the other side of the table. In 2006 he served as a United Nations ambassador teaching Western culinary skills at a nonprofit school north of Hanoi.Today he's the rare culinary leader designing one idea to flex across sit-down restaurants, airports, international franchises, and a frozen business with Nestlé worth north of $230 million CPK now sells more frozen pizzas than restaurant pizzas, and its top frozen market is Charlotte, North Carolina. He sits between marketing and operations and speaks both languages, which is exactly why his story about betting the company on hand-stretching every pizza is the most useful thing in this episode.In this episode:The mac and cheese TikTok, the deadpan training video, and what "run toward it" actually looks like in real timeWhy telling Rick and Larry "no" almost cost Paul the job and the reframe that saved itScrapping a 30-year dough press to hand-stretch every pizza: marketing said "let's go," ops said "we'll never keep up"The West Coast Burger and the crispy chicken sandwich: what happens when a dish is too good for the kitchen it lives inHow to design one flavor idea for a hearth oven, a frozen line, and a franchisee in IndiaWhy ops buy-in comes before creative ambition, every timeSay hi to everyone from the dishwasher to the GM the Rick and Larry habit Paul still practices 16 years laterHis honest advice to young cooks: "You gotta be a little nuts"Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Most of the restaurant industry sells self-ordering kiosks on one number: labor saved. Brandon Barton thinks that's exactly the wrong pitch. As CEO of Bite, whose software runs kiosks for Portillo's, Chopt, Krispy Kreme, Big Chicken, and Arby's inside Love's Travel Stops… he argues that a screen isn't a cost cut. It's a hospitality channel, and it can out-serve a slammed cashier on a Friday night.Brandon earned what he calls his "masters degree in Enlightened Hospitality" running beverage at Danny Meyer's Tabla, then carried that education into tech at Avero, as the first non-tech hire at Resy, and now at Bite. In this conversation with Andy, he makes the skeptic's case for digital hospitality and gets specific about what separates a kiosk guests love from one they tolerate.This one is for operators: the reasoning is practical, the takes are honest (including which vendors are "lying" about their numbers), and the playbook is usable Monday morning.Highlights:Why "telling someone your order" was never the hospitality and where the human should go insteadHow to design for "graceful failure" so a screen can apologize like your best serverThe one question to ask Shake Shack's team before betting your career on a categoryWhat Danny Meyer drills into you that no management book can teachHow to read the next AI pitch and spot the vaporware behind the 20% check-lift claimThe three fixes for a five-location operator whose kiosks feel coldSubscribe to Restaurant Reset for practical conversations with the people reshaping how restaurants run. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop regularly. Hit follow so you don't miss one.Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.