Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, joined the podcast fresh off of a trip to Las Vegas where he attended Starbucks’ Leadership Experience 2025, where 14,000 managers from the coffeehouse chain, as well as its top executives and other leaders, gathered to reinvigorate the brand, which has faced declining sales for the past year, making it an outlier in the otherwise booming coffeehouse segment. 

Bret shared some of Starbucks’ latest operational initiatives and discussed some of the new menu items he tried, including a layered “strato” Frappuccino, and a raspberry croissant, which he said was a foreshadowing of the raspberry syrup that was being brought back this summer.

Pat shared her observations of the latest trendy items of the week, including mocktails at Einstein Bros Bagels, tortilla-crusted chicken strips at Taco Bell, and a variety of new ranch dressings — both Taco Bell and Chipotle have new avocado ranch sauces — and seasonal barbecue-themed items. That led to a conversation between the two hosts about the proliferation of sauces, which are highly impactful in terms of taste and fairly easy to use operationally, both important factors in these times of expensive labor and declining traffic.

Then Bret shared his interview with Jonathon Sawyer, chef of Kindling Downtown Cookout & Cocktails, a restaurant in Chicago’s Willis Tower.