The Salad Project: Discipline, Design & Salads with Soul- Florian De Chezelles

0:19Florian De Chezelles:Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast. I'm your host Ruth Hittock and today's guest is Florian De Chezelle, co-founder of The Salad Project, one of the most exciting design-forward food brands in London right now. We talk about what it takes to grow a hospitality concept that's both consistent and creatively exciting, growth pains, founder mistakes, brand partnerships and building a culture at scale. Let's get into it. Welcome to the podcast, Florian. So I'd love to hear where the idea for The Salad Project came from.

0:46Ruth:Hi, Ruth. Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here today. The Salad Project idea came from the fact that both my co-founder and I, my co-founder is called James, a very good friend of mine, we have a real hospitality background. We studied it at university and that's where we met. And in fact, we've only ever worked in this sector. So we don't really know anything beyond the world of hospitality. And we were working in London after graduating and thought that as a general observation, we thought the UK deserved better access to healthy fast food. There was a real opportunity in London to provide a better experience in the fast casual sector.

1:23Ruth:And our passion is to build hospitality concepts. We're not chefs. We've got strong hospitality experience, but we're not dedicated chefs. And it was always about finding, it was never going to be about opening a mission-style restaurant. What really gets us excited and where our skill set is building a concept that we can grow and applying our passion and expertise in hospitality and all it encompasses. And so the Salad Project just made a lot of sense.

1:50Florian De Chezelles:You launched in 2021, just after COVID. It was a terrible time for hospitality. Did that feel risky at the time? There's obviously been a few more storms since then too. Cost of living, people working from home. You think, how come you've managed to thrive when so many others are struggling in these circumstances?

2:10Ruth:To answer your second question, it's because we were born from the ashes. And so we were in the fortunate position to be born in a new world and to create a concept that was a post-COVID concept from the get-go rather than having to play catch up on a lot of things, which was obviously the tough position that every concept was in that existed pre-pandemic. It felt risky, yes, undeniably. Hindsight tells me that COVID was the single best thing that happened to the Salad Project, but obviously you don't know that until it's happened. We had quit our jobs six months before the pandemic with the intention to open in March 2020 or April 2020, but obviously got hit with this global catastrophe.

2:57And we weathered the storm, continued to work on our business plan,

3:02Ruth:and we took a huge risk in December 2020 and signed a lease, which is very much mid-pandemic times, if you remember. But obviously that ended up being a great decision because we got access to a unit that was not only very cheap as a result of the pandemic, but it was also a unit that no matter how much money we might have thrown at it, as a new unproven concept with two 25-year-olds at the helm, we would have just never gotten. Obviously, I feel the pain of our peers in the industry who experienced a pre - and post-pandemic world. I feel immensely lucky to have been able to start everything from scratch once the pandemic is.

3:42Florian De Chezelles:What did that first year teach you about your customer, your team, the concept for yourselves?

3:49Ruth:Hospitality is hard. People always tell you, oh, but restaurants fail all the time. And I think the answer to that lies in the fact that in reality, the barriers to entry, to opening a restaurant are relatively low. You don't need, or at face value, one might think that you don't need experience. People take for granted the kind of 360 approach that you need to have. And so what it really taught me that first year was that the beauty of hospitality lies in innovation, but not in innovation necessarily of a concept. It lies in innovation of execution. Now, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can take a proven idea and put your spin on it.

4:31Ruth:Nothing will ever... You can't run a restaurant business without being prepared for never-ending hours. And consistency over short sprints of hard work is key. Every single customer that you serve, If you're getting judged on, you're only as good as your last salad. So you obviously need to be very hardworking, but you need to be relentless. And five years later today, that very much is still the ethos that we have to remind ourselves of. And no matter what training course you might have done or no matter how much you think the sector, which obviously James and I went into this feeling quite confident because we'd done a dedicated course in hospitality management and had worked in restaurants and hotel.

5:14Ruth:nothing really prepares you for the reality of a shift. And if you want to build a large concept that will be successful, there is no getting away from getting stuck in and getting your hands dirty at the start. And it's, you have to do it. It's immensely helpful. You learn a lot about your own business and yeah, you've got to get stuck in.

5:34Florian De Chezelles:Any mistakes that turned out to be useful lessons? Yeah, I'd say we've made a lot of mistakes in our journey.

5:41Ruth:I think one that every single time you make a mistake, you always end up learning from one way or the other. So you really do need the mistakes. They're super important and you're never going to get everything right. It's just impossible. It's about how you react. But I think the mistake James and I did is we didn't leverage the network that is available. I think we went into this too individually. And I think the classic mistake that we made is that in our very first store, we designed a kitchen that was significantly too small for the operation that we had. And whilst that brought its benefits in that we had to really adapt our menu and learn to be lean, it cost us a lot of headaches and a lot of money to enter the drain.

6:24Ruth:That would have been a very avoidable mistake had we taken the opportunity to speak with experienced, seasoned restauranteurs who could have understood the output that we were trying to create and understand our flow and would have looked at our kitchen and said, that's too small, you need to design it in this way. Yeah, I think obviously hospitality industry, there was a lot of people out there who have done it successfully. In the end, for large parts of it, it's just the playbook. And there was some, no matter how creative you might be, there are some fundamentals, tried and tested processes that just exist.

6:57Ruth:And so when starting a business, I can't stress how important it is to go tap into this just knowledge that exists out there. And I guess I wish we'd done it a little bit more back then.

7:07Florian De Chezelles:You guys learned the hard way.

7:09Ruth:Yes.

7:09Florian De Chezelles:Let's talk a bit about the brand, because I think Salad Project has this very distinctive, modern, design-led energy. It's not wellness beige. How did you develop the brand? What was the brief in your own head?

7:22Ruth:So the brand was always going to be a key pillar of our business. I think that when we came up with the idea of the Salah Project, it was incredibly apparent to us that the way that we were going to compete and stand out was by having a very 360 holistic approach to a, what fundamentally is a quick service restaurant. And this holds true today. We always thought we need to have the best food possible, of course. But that really is only about 25 % of what our concept is. And that in itself won't be enough. And we thought the absolute key was to have the best food possible, but also to have the best in-store design as we possibly could, to have the strongest brand as we could with a real lifestyle play and to have the best enablement of technology.

8:16Ruth:Again, this is a piece on the kind of post-COVID world. And I think that is our, I would say that it's our magic recipe, is to approach it from every angle and to not let any aspect of the restaurant experience not get the same attention to detail as the others. And I think that's where we thought when we came into the market in 2021, that's where we thought what lack it, you had salad bars that potentially had a decent food, but were forgetful of the other three pillars. Or you had certain quick service concepts that maybe had a great brand but had forgotten about how technology needs to be inputted, etc.

8:53Ruth:That was very much our kind of differentiation. The Salad Project is about creating a lifestyle brand. We are a partner to our customers in their goal of living their best life. We want to allow customers to make delicious and good choices for themselves and support them along their busy lifestyle, whatever that might be, whether they're artists or athletes or whether they're city rats who work long hours and need needs, who don't have the time, frankly, or the interest or the skill to be able to meal prep something like the Salad Project. It was about fitting in that gap between a phenomenal salad that you might have the Ritz Hotel and the Pret box that existed at the time that cost five quid and that frankly wasn't very satisfying to people.

9:42Ruth:There was a gap in the middle of those two things. And the brand is the extension of James and I's vision. Obviously, we now have a team and is obviously one of the things that we protect the most. And yeah, I'm very proud of what we've achieved there. And branding is very exciting because there's just so much you can do and you can keep reinventing yourself and trying out new things. So yeah.

10:02Florian De Chezelles:Was that part of your kind of COVID preparation, getting to spend a bit more time on developing the brand and the design and the look and feel?

10:10Ruth:Absolutely. I think fundamentally, you've got to remember that we are, these are not sexy words, but we are a fast foods operator, quick service restaurant, fast casual. And where we thought there was a brilliant opportunity is a lot of the big players that exist worldwide or in the UK are not very creative in their approach to marketing and very focused on the product rather than in the experience. And we thought there's a brilliant opportunity to stand out, to sell, to promote a lifestyle and to try and evoke a sense of emotion rather than just shove a product down people's face all day long.

10:44Ruth:And you will see if you take the time to look at our various communication channels, Instagram, email, website, et cetera, we obviously we speak about our product, but we try and go far beyond that. And this is a very basic comparison. But in the same way that Nike are not going to tell you about the reason why their running shoe is great because of this and that, they'll sell you the experience around the product. And that's very much what we try to do. And I think it's exciting. And I think in London, there are not many restaurant groups that do that.

11:14Florian De Chezelles:Agreed. So let's talk about scaling. How did you know you were ready to open the second site?

11:20Ruth:We always had this kind of success factor in our heads. As I said, when we got started, Salad Project was always going to be about much more than the food. And so we never went into, tying back to what I was saying earlier, a lot of restaurant concepts, what they'll do is they'll start with a minimum viable product and they will host some dinners at home, gather some feedback. And if that shows promise, then they'll maybe start with a tiny little stall in a market and sell their product there. And if that's then successful, maybe they'll think about starting to opening a full brick and mortar store, but it'll be potentially quite a small footprint, etc.

11:55Ruth:We always knew that was not going to be the journey we would be on because, again, the Salar Project was always going to be about much more than the food. And so we needed a great, beautiful space with an amazing design and a great kind of customer experience to really express ourselves. And when we opened in May 2021, it was very much pandemic times. We were all wearing masks on the line, I remember. Everyone was still working from home, you know, and then it just gradually got better. We went from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday weeks to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then Friday started picking up.

12:27Ruth:And we all said to ourselves, okay, what we need to look at is, irrespective of the business model, ignoring the bottom line, do customers want the product that we have built? Are we popular? And so the kind of the KPI there was, do we have a long queue every day at lunch? And the other one was, what is the feedback that we're hearing? When we're standing in the queue and we hear people inevitably talk about their lunch, what are we hearing? Are we hearing that this is great, that this is new? Are they in tune? Are they understanding of what we're trying to do? And I would say about eight months after we opened, we started to consistently get a queue out the door at lunch.

13:05Ruth:And then that's when we thought, OK, our hypothesis, which was that our concept doesn't exist in London and that Londoners don't really know what they're missing out on, is being validated. And that's when James and I decided to, we were very much working in the restaurant every day at that point, operationally. We split our roles. James said, OK, I'll keep looking after the restaurant and then you need to head into an office and start thinking about raising money, finding new locations, doing marketing, etc.

13:33Florian De Chezelles:What were the first growing pains? Operations, people or consistency? Or all three?

13:39Ruth:It took a long time to figure out. Obviously, we were managing the store every single day. So, you know, we were in 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. And so we had control on everything. We knew that wasn't sustainable. And then eventually we would need to put some kind of management team in place. It was very hard and took a lot of testing and learning to determine what we would centralize and decentralize, what we would ask of the management team. Were they responsible for placing orders or not? Or was it just a HR approach? Were they responsible for hiring people or was that going to be our responsibility?

14:13Ruth:Were they responsible for firing people? Again, would that be us, etc.? So the growing pain was there. It was in about really figuring out what do we need management to do. And then I remember very well when we opened our second store in Bank, immediately our first store in Spitterfield started having issues. And it just showed that we hadn't quite standardized our operation enough. And at the moment we took our eye off the ball, the team there wasn't working in a very good flow. But to be fair, that continues to be the case. We're constantly refining that today. You're never, ever, never, ever done, if you like.

14:49Ruth:You're always, every store you're opening, you're always refining your processes and yeah it's a real it's a real journey but

14:57Florian De Chezelles:what's changed about the role each of you play from beginning to now?

15:02Ruth:It's radically different I think the learning curve has been so steep it was only four years ago where I was chopping lettuce and sweeping floors and now unfortunately don't have the time to be spent the time I'd like to spend in our stores it was interesting we had our big kind of end of year company presentation last week, which we call the state of the nation, where we effectively kind of recap on the year and the goals that we had set ourselves and set a new direction for the following year. And I was explaining to the team that James and I's responsibility now with a team of 350 people and 11 stores, you know, they are the ones who make the magic work on a daily basis.

15:43Ruth:They're the ones who serve our customers. They're the one who fulfill the orders. They're the ones who have their really finger on the pulse. Our responsibility today is to provide clarity on a long-term, medium-term, and short-term vision of what we want this company to be, where we want to go, and what we need to do over the next 12 months in order to take the next step towards that vision. We very much feel like shepherds these days, and it's really important as we grow we understand that's where our value is and because by understanding that's where our value we are also empowering our teams to take responsibility and accountability which is so key because we can't get around all the 11 stores anymore we can't have a direct relationship with every team member so it's it's less it's a lot more officey and it's a lot less operational but it's very important and also very satisfying what do you think has been the biggest

16:39Florian De Chezelles:growth inflection point? Was it one to two, five to 10, somewhere in the middle?

16:44Ruth:Two was definitely one of the hardest. Yes, I think it was one to two. I think we're about to go through a very difficult period as well of going from effectively 11 this year to 18 next year with international expansion and regional expansion. So I think we're in for a hell of a ride over the next 12 months. So we spent the whole year trying to forecast and anticipate and to trying to build up our team and get the ship ready for sale. But I think you're never quite ready. Yeah, I think you never quite know what's going to hit you. It's about being as agile and reactive as possible and frankly, just hardworking and consistent when the inevitable storms ahead of us.

17:24Florian De Chezelles:Has it felt like running a different company with the different stages of growth?