How The Salad Project Built a £10M Healthy Food Brand w/ Clem Hexby || GTG S07 E05

0:00So like how much money does it cost to open up a salad project bar? Um, about half a million pounds. Per site? During my teenage years had an eating disorder. I learned at that time or I trained my brain to think of food really negatively and exercise as something that takes away from you, i.e. like helps you stay skinnier. And by training as a PT and taking my nutrition qualification, I learned the opposite about how exercise and food can be additive to your life. I time block the fuck out of my life. So my calendar is a sight to behold. So like you'll literally go like, wake up, brush teeth.

0:38No. Before we get into today's episode, I want to give a shout out to a special sponsor, Sam Lawrence Recruitment. We all know that finding the right people or the right job can feel really overwhelming and that's exactly where Sam comes in. He really just gets it. It's not just about ticking boxes. It's about connecting the right people with the right opportunities. He takes the time to understand you and exactly what you're looking for, whether you're building a team or taking that next career leap. So definitely get in touch. Trust me, you'll be glad you did. Charlie is a three-time founding member of Startup Brands, taking each from 0 to 1 million within 18 months, across different categories, channels and countries, including launching operations in the US and Australia.

1:20He is now the founder of Plugin Brands, an award-winning, outsourced FMCG sales agency working with the fast-growth food and drink brands, and Dive-In Agency, a tick-top shop agency helping brands turn social commerce into real revenue. With a background in go-to market strategy, brand development, and distribution through retail and wholesale channels, there isn't any one better place to help you supercharge your brand. Charlie and the Plugin Brands team work with a host of brands, including Moju, Muller, Clipper T, Who Gives a Crap, and Lovecorn. So if you're in need of an extra pair of hands to really step on your growth this year, Charlie is the guy you need to be in touch with.

2:00Getting to Grow is also brought to you by the Coconut Collab. And full disclosure, as I'm sure most of you are aware, I work there. So I know how much love goes into everything that we make. We're all about creating delicious, dairy-free, plant-based treats that do not compromise on taste. from our creamy yogurts to our indulgent desserts everything's made with coconuts and a whole lot of care if you're looking for something naturally good but seriously tasty and my favorite is just our natural coconut yogurt i have it most mornings with granola and lots of honey trust me you're going to absolutely love it i am so excited for this episode of getting to go because we have the amazing clem haxby who is like the insane brains behind salad project which everybody knows about if you're based in London and also just their socials are smashing it all over.

2:46My favourite salad ever, which we had earlier. So thank you for bringing me my salad. I get the protein Caesar. It's just so, the dressing. Oh my God, it's so good. So Clem, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. What a treat. Tell me about you, what you were doing before and how you kind of came into the Salad Project and I guess you're also a bit about your nutritional background because I know that's been a big part of your journey too. Totally, yeah. I guess big questions. So I left uni and I'd studied art history and was basically told or constantly asked, what the hell are you going to do with that degree?

3:21And it really embedded in me as a belief that I was going to do nothing of note because everyone thought that it was a useless degree. So I kind of fell into working in digital marketing. I took a job that my boyfriend at the time from university was like, Clem, literally you just whack your CV in there. obviously none of us had anything on our cv at that point because we were like 21 also this is all like pre-ai yeah it was like really what you had in your brain this is analog this is like get your shit together and think about things um and it was like yeah whack your cv in and and you just need to say if you like tea or coffee and i actually can't remember what i say i like put now because i'm now like oh god i actually couldn't decide between the two but i'm actually really yeah exactly with cold phone obviously obviously put the application in and got accepted and I ended up working for this startup agency um in their new business department so I was the first hire into their new business team um and ended up basically leading on the kind of pitch side of the team so I was building marketing strategies and digital for um every big business that you can imagine H &M, American Express, Financial Times and I was traveling a lot back and forth between America and the UK because I started taking over a lot of their UK, sorry their American clients as we were launching an office out there.

4:41So I spent time living in Austin and all alongside working crazily for this startup as anyone in any startup can attest to. I was going to the gym because I'd moved to London and didn't have sports anymore. And suddenly you're like, what am I supposed to do? How do I like, at university, I played loads of sport, did not set foot in a gym once. And also no one was aware of what nutrition and like eating well meant because it was just, how do I cure this hangover? So then suddenly you're in London and you're supposed to be doing all these things, working really hard, going to the gym, getting a boyfriend, like madness.

5:17And I'm a real perfectionist and I need to like have a qualification in everything that I do otherwise I have no confidence in my ability to do it okay so like going to the gym can't go to the gym unless you're a personal trainer yeah can't cook and like maybe put a shit photo on Instagram unless you're a nutritionist okay so alongside work I started by doing my personal training um and everyone who I would then be like working with as a client or just like talking to I was mainly doing it for my own like education as opposed to taking on loads of business but everyone will be like what am I supposed to eat and I kind of knew like I ate really healthily um and so I knew but again didn't want to talk about it unless I had a qualification so I did a year-long part-time diploma alongside work which was literally wake up at 5am do like two hours of studying go to work come home at like 9pm do two hours of studying it was bonkers and like go to the gym all the time because I was obsessed with exercise at this point um shockingly that um all spiraled and i basically burnt out yeah i burnt out listening yeah i'm exhausted and so i was like right well i know that i'm a go-getter i know that i've got drive in me i'm passionate about health and wellness i had during my teenage years had an eating disorder and i'd basically i'd learned at that time or i trained my brain to think of food really negatively and exercise as something that takes away from you i.e like helps you stay skinnier and by training as a pt and and taking my nutrition qualification i learned the opposite about how um exercise and food can be additive to your life and how like actually by being more and more additive and bringing an abundance of great stuff into your life you can feel feel yourself way better and avoid things like burnout um so i wanted to spread that word i uh very fortunately had shares in the agency that I was working with so I got a small payout and I put it straight into going to culinary school because again if I'm gonna be talking more about food or cooking for people or achieving my dream of writing a cookbook um I can't can you pass it to me I've stupidly put it there I can't read it enter dream um I needed to trade as a chef yeah so then I went off to culinary school and at the end of that got introduced to two guys who are the co-founders of Sala Project James and Florian um and they were they had this idea to build a salad bar in London and they wanted um someone to come in and build the product so I joined the journey and I've designed all of their salads ever since honestly like what a cool journey I'm obsessed with the fact that you have to get a qualification in everything everything I have you're so unique I'm WSET level three because I love wine and I now teach women about wine to empower them with wine knowledge and so I've taken I want to do my diploma but you basically need someone to sponsor you to do that and it's a full-time kind of thing so I will do that one day but again fell in love with wine and was like great must learn everything about it so I'm a bit of a wine expert like this is so fucking impressive I'm genuinely like I'm obsessed with you oh I'm obsessed with you I'm obsessed with you this is phenomenal and your salads are 10 10 like there's just nothing wrong with them um so you've dominated london like let's be honest let's be honest doing our best yeah i mean you're i mean i'm obsessed with your product just said that a few times the obsessed would be like the biggest word you know but um you have like with the salad project it has been one of you know the brands that i look at and i think wow they've totally fucking nailed the customer need yeah i think so many people bring product to market that haven't done their research clearly don't know what the customer wants but like every time i walk into the salad project i remember right yeah i was actually ahead of my time here i remember going back to like years ago it was like really in its infancy like this healthy eating thing and i remember saying to my boyfriend at the time i wish there was a place you could go and you could like choose what you wanted and it was like a bar concept for mine it was more like breakfast at the time so i'd be like a granola bowl station love that so you had like a big pot of yogurt we did do that at one point yeah and like you could have your toppings yeah and i thought oh my god i'm so clever some blueberries yeah i thought that would be a great idea i never did it because i don't know why i just obviously didn't get my shit together and do it and probably eventually let's be honest if i had done it probably would have been in gone in salads because naturally that would have been like the breakfast time never know yeah yeah um so like talk about customer need like i feel like everyone is out eating a lot healthier people are really aware of what they're putting in their body they don't want shit like we don't want to eat crap like you know especially london we have slightly more disposable income that we can afford like a healthier lunch um so talk to me about i guess the founders brought you in and so how you've been developing the most delicious salads to face this earth so honestly like from day one everything was built on intuition so the guys had um seen firsthand in in the states what was kicking off in terms of salad world um and knew that obviously the states is always basically like five years ahead of the uk and everything food and drink particularly um and they were both working in hospitality but in like hotel management and um one of them was working at expedia and so very different type of hospitality um and they wanted to get more like in into the ground and in front of people um and so yeah they were basically like okay well let's just have a crack bringing out to London they have serious balls in that I am exactly the same as you I when I was at culinary school saw an example of someone who'd graduated from Ballymaloo the school that I was at and they had set up um a salad bar in Ireland and I was like that is so me I wish I could do the salad bar but I left culinary school being like I'm gonna build a retreats business or like I genuinely it didn't even cross my mind that I would do that because in my head I was like it's so hard it's so hard to build a salad business there's so much I don't know and anyway it's kind of one of those the guys kind of crack on despite not knowing I as the person who needs every qualification under the sun in order to even talk would never have done that on my own so anyway someone to kind of have the idea and you yeah totally and then I can deliver and And so came in and yeah, built a salad menu genuinely based off our tastes and our intuitions.

11:53I mean, you got it. We've all got different tastes, but that's great because it means we always compromise together and end up with the menu that we have. And then over time, it's just been a case of like you say product market fit. We didn't do any research. Frankly, we saw that people love salads. Yes. And there's a drive towards healthy eating. Yes. And we'd seen, we'd worked in offices in London where getting food at lunchtime was a pain in the arse because you'd go to I won't say any bad names but like a place where you'd get a sandwich and it would still end up costing you 10 quid once you've walked out the door and it doesn't give you any nutritional value 3 p.m you're starving hungry again you need snacks before you want to go to the gym blah blah blah so we knew that there was a space for this and then since then it's like how can we use all of the data that we get which luckily we get loads of because we've got loads of customers so we can see cool we got cue out the door perfect we must we're doing something right and now it's just like test and refine and make sure that we're keeping up with the industry that's moving alongside us at a million miles an hour like it's not just us who's moving really quickly every part of food and beverage is and so my job is to just keep developing keep staying creative and keep trying to stay like one step ahead I guess um which is hard but also a lot of fun yeah like I think so much fun in what you're doing as well like you're it's happening it's now and i think also like when i because i work in food obviously as well and i'm selling yogurt yeah like it doesn't have to be that deep like we're not saving lives we're hopefully making a better impact on people but like we're not doing anything like it's not rocket science what we're doing like we just say that to my team i'm like guys at the end of it because we it's it's quite high pressure environment at the salad project like we do seven billion things at once yeah and my team can attest to that our stand up this morning was like cool um and so i'm always like but wait lest we forget it's only salad yeah so yeah it's okay like we will be fine yeah and um how did you so where was the first location of salad project spittlefields spittlefields and then you expanded to bank was our next door yeah so that was where we actually then launched breakfast a la build your own granola okay um and i didn't know you guys did that yeah we did it we did it for like six months we ended up it was too early in our journey basically for us to do that we're working on it again um for hopefully sometime next year we'll see um but at the time it was just like a bit of a distraction when we needed to just be focusing on how the hell do we go from one restaurant to two and make it work financially so yeah we opened the second one within 18 months and then within like six to nine months of the bank store opening uh we opened a dark kitchen in battersea and then oxford circus which quickly became our busiest site um and then is that on near selfridges that no no open in january bond street sorry that's now our busiest site yeah you're talking about the one on the corner exactly the green one yeah um and then as of last week we opened our 12th so all of that literally we've gone from two to 12 in exactly almost to the day three years because the openings manager who opened Notting Hill the other day.

15:01She was my kitchen manager when we opened bank. And so she, I bought her a necklace at the end of the whole opening because it was like the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life. Going from running one restaurant where you're already like, I'm so out of my depth, I don't know what I'm doing, to then having to manage two was for us. We, I remember me and the founder sitting down, we'd be like, what is the key to this? Like, we don't understand. Some of our competitors who had gone through that and maybe they'd hit three or four, we were like, they've just got, they've got like the secret password to how you manage this and now i look back on it and i'm like i could open five stores it before christmas and genuinely it would be fine as long as we had like a couple of team members additional we could so do that and i wouldn't be panicked in any way and is that because you now know how you you got the like you know how to do it yeah also it's about kitting out the place right like but you've already got those contacts now you know how to kit shop oh 100 and it's it's systems like we're at the salad project we are obsessed with and this also comes from the agency that I worked in was like tech focused and so everything had to be a process so we worked on this framework called fast which is formalize automate share test and it was basically anything you did whether it was inviting your team to give feedback on an event or it was organizing an event or it was organizing a team social or it was sending an email to clients you had to formalize what the process of doing that was so it might be like templating an email or it might be automating a feedback form that gets sent out that's the automate bit then you share that with your team you have them test it and then you feed it back in and you like reformalize re-automate re-share retest and so everything that you do in any area of the business has a system and so for opening a store for us we have a system that is literally like we click go and everyone knows where they need to be and what they're doing and what they're owning and how they get things done more efficiently and every time we open a store we then like feed back into the system and make it better for the next time so is this is it a literal system no or is it like an excel spreadsheet it's like a project management board is what we all feed into okay all of the different elements of that so that's like that basically manages and and there are lots of other bits that go around it but it's like it's equipment purchasing it's we build a template of every single piece of equipment that we need yes how we're going to audit what we already have that spare how that's going to get moved over there like all of that is made as efficient as possible and so removes human error and like cock-ups of like opening day oh shit we forgot to all of the pans or whatever um yeah i've literally been like for oxford circus i remember running around central london being like our trays have not arrived we can't cook any food and so like that is me running to nisbetts to go and like buy out all of their trays because that store only has like five trays in that nisbet so then i go to shoreditch to go to the other one to pick up like 35 more and then i like hop on the tube and take them over and finally we can start cooking everything is geared towards eliminating any possibility of those kind of fuck ups yeah um so yeah we're pretty good at it now so speaking of fuck ups yeah tell we do some like really not i guess not fuck ups but like yes fuck ups mistakes that you've made along the way that you're now like oh my god if only i'd done that things would have been different i wish i hadn't done this so i would definitely never i know it's really cliche to say but I would never say there's anything that I wish we hadn't done yeah because I it is bonkers how much we know now and like I don't say that in an arrogant way I say it because we fucked up a lot along the way and that's just crucial because there's no one there to teach you any of this stuff like I remember when I first joined the salad project and it was like cool so let's just like launch a rest a restaurant with all of these recipes cooked by team none of whom have any like kitchen experience i was like is anyone going to tell me how that even like what's even the first step yeah now it seems so obvious to me but the what the reason i realize it's not obvious is i then hire people into my team and they're like what the fuck do you mean how do i do that and i'm like oh yeah i forgot you haven't learned along the way yeah so i i wouldn't change anything um but probably our biggest fuck-ups i would say are um like hires okay yeah do you know what that's not you're not the first person I'm sure I'm not and particularly in a bit like it's been as we tried to move because in the early days it was literally James and Florian were running front of house and I was running the kitchen and so literally that would be me being like I am cooking the chicken I remember like hiding because our whole thing was transparency so you could like see through to the kitchen but our Spitalfield site was right across the road from loads of people who'd graduated from my uni and like gone in to be lawyers and so we're like doing really really well and I was there literally chopping chicken like next to my team feeling like oh my god they're gonna think I'm just like working here like this is my post-culinary school like she's working in the kitchen I was on yeah and like I was pot washing I was doing everything in the kitchen um so moving from that to then when we're like okay we can't be in the store 24 7 because we can't make any progress on like our business development so we had to go through this process of like removing ourselves and obviously replacing ourselves with hires and my god like in Spitalfields the number of kitchen managers that we hired to take over the kitchen who were disastrous I mean literally disastrous there's like we've you know been threatened to be sued for no like reason whatsoever like that's why I'm happy to say it because there was honestly like no standing for it um like people coming back they would I'd get calls at like 4 a.m 3 p.m midnight from people who were like completely bonkers and they'd walked out of the kitchen like three days before just as we were opening to like serve so I'd have to like run down to then just like take over the kitchen again then they'd be calling me at like 4 a.m being like why have you fired me and I'd be like you left like I've just been running the kitchen since and like so many mad characters came through those stores but that's like again we learned from it in that all of it happened at spittlefields when we just had spittlefields i we haven't had any of those issues since then yeah and now we have amazing team members amazing managers across all of our sites so i'd say hiring was a big one that definitely led to like some big hiccups other mistakes one that like again we we never would have known not to make it but we when we launched we launched with big metal bowls that meant you had to you built the salad in the bowls tossed it and then you pour it into the service bowl and it literally meant that we had at any one time we'd have four kps on so kitchen porters doing the washing up because we're serving like you know 500 people or whatever through a lunch service and that's 500 bowls that we then need to wash up because there's like allergen there's cross-contamination there's chicken there's whatever all getting tossed around in this bowl they whack it in a bin that goes back to the kitchen porters and they're there like washing and drying and we're sending back forwards like wet bowls and it was carnage and so we then have just redesigned a bowl that means we can build everything in there toss it in there and we we've literally removed four kps from our kitchen so we only ever have one pot wash and they're just washing up all the kitchen utensils we've like completely removed the risk that's associated with all of the cross-contamination that you get from using those metal bowls.

22:18It has literally transformed our business. What did you do with all the bowls? Great question. I actually don't know. I guess we, maybe we gave them to like a charity. Gosh, because I'm thinking like that's a lot. I love those silver bowls. Well, the problem was like we didn't have 500 of them. So we had like a hundred maybe. And that was the issue. And that was the problem. yeah. Yeah. Fine, I'm here with you. I'm like, fuck, where should we do all the bowls? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, how the fuck do you balance like everything you do? I'm very much like you We're quite like Similar humans I can tell Intensive Like we have 500 things on the go Yeah We love leopard print We Do you love leopard print too?

22:55I love leopard print I'm obsessed I'm actually like A ganny gal I'm a huge ganny gal Honestly it's terrifying The amount of money I spend in that shop Do you know what's This is self-topic But I'm just going to tell you I get messages From the Soho store manager Being like Hey Zoe The new collection's in Want to come I'm local And I'm like That's iconic That is iconic I'm like if I'm That level Love it Go for it girl that's success that is literally if someone had asked me to write down what is success for you I'd be like personal contact with Ganny she's lovely Alice shout out to Alice I'm going to tell her next time I go like you because I told her about the pod and I was like how do I get sponsored yeah because you wore a full Ganny outfit I only wear Ganny I only wear red Ganny I've got the same shoes by the way the red ones the pointy ones I know they're the love of my life my team got me a voucher for my birthday and that's what I spent them on I'm obsessed with it they can't do anything wrong that is goals if like Ganny and salad projects If I could like Contract my life That's also my dream collab I know Yeah yeah yeah I know Your face No stop I don't want to do it myself I'm literally That's going to be amazing I'm coming I'm coming To the collab launch Um And So yeah I get asked this question a lot And I think it's funny Like hearing other people's reply to it Because I think like There is no answer It's just innately in us To do it Like We just do it Like that's what people say And they're like But how And I'm like I don't know There is no how You just get it done Like you have these hours You block it You do it Yeah and I think it's because we also run at 150 miles an hour and we clearly are like high energy Duracell bunnies of humans so what's your answer to what how you manage it oh my god that's such a great question I I definitely do not have the perfect solution to like how you do it over a long period of time I go go go go go go go go and then I must like stop recover and then I can go go go go go go again what is your stop recover well that's literally like uh i mean the stop is the crash point so that might be like after three months of go go go go go i'm like i need to step back from this because i'm not giving anyone as much attention or love or like energy as i'd like to and that for me is like soul crushing because i'm always described as or asked how the hell do you have so much energy so the minute that i feel like i don't emanate that i'm like i'm not being my full self and I've been able to be my full self the past three months or whatever um like a great example is through the book writing process so I wrote the book alongside full-time work we opened a store and launched a full new menu within I had two months to write the book and in those two months we opened a restaurant we launched a whole new menu and we launched a partnership with Bown Grace Beverly all in the same time that I was writing it and so I would literally like I'd get up again kind of throwback to my nutrition days I'd wake up at like five I would be writing up recipes that I tested the day before I would have tested all the like loads of recipes on a Sunday my boyfriend just ate like seven billion salads every weekend and I'd be writing them like late into the evenings um and then doing all of the other work with my team but the the how I I think I sustain it when I'm in that zone is I always prioritize exercise if I'm if I stop being able to do that I know that I'm about to hit crash point yeah so i do crossfit and it's my like sweat out all of my cortisol and like make me feel me again so that's my like daily refresh i'll go like each morning to go to crossfit i time block the fuck out of my life so my calendar is a sight to be hold to behold um my team are literally go like wake up brush teeth no but basically i am like yeah i'll be like okay six a.m till seven crossfit 7 till 7 30 travel 7 30 till 8 email check-in 8 till 8 30 like maybe that'll be my little break where I'm like go get my coffee um but during my working day everything is blocked because in my role because I oversee two massive departments in our business um when I'm in the office I'm like I'm like an octopus being left right and center and so if I don't have in my calendar like yo this is my time then I'll be like can I borrow you five minutes can I borrow you five minutes can I borrow you five minutes and then it's 7 p.m and I'm like okay now I'm gonna sit down and do my work so I need to be really strict about that I'm definitely not strict enough but that's why I work late um and then other ways that I manage it uh do you know what I honestly think it's just like I eat really well I eat a lot yeah I eat a lot I'm not even I don't have time to be really fussy around I don't know what like the latest nutritional fads are mainly because I'm not interested and I don't buy into them because a lot of it's bollocks um I don't know like all of the latest trends of you know we're talking about electrolytes earlier like supplements and electrolytes and all of that stuff I'm sure is fabulous for certain people I don't have time for it because I don't have time to research it I can't be bothered to even order it because I don't have time to fit it into my day to work out how it's going to benefit me.

27:59So I just eat a big breakfast, a big lunch, a big dinner. If I don't, again, it's because I know I'm heading towards crash point. I eat in my desk, which isn't great because I don't get that time outside, but at least I eat a big salad and it fuels me right through the afternoon and then I reload myself so I think my way of like staying balanced and staying energized is through um exercise and nutrition but it's by being realistic about what that looks like and not getting over anxious about what loads of people are telling me I should be eating or shouldn't be eating or should be doing or exercise should be doing loads people are like if you're really stressed you shouldn't be doing hip because it's going to send your cortisol into crazy levels it works for me so I do it and so I don't want to listen to the noise because it's going to make me feel more stressed and I think about I think about balance in kind of quite a particular way which is I have this analogy with a seesaw right where if you're I need to like clarify in my head before I explain it wrong because I did last time that I said it but basically you let's say on this seesaw one end is um like I'm trying to think about exactly the best way to say this working really really hard and the other end is being really really healthy so if you're at the far end of the seesaw in each side that basically means you're let's say it's a scale so you've got the middle bit here this side is like enjoying life and like partying hard and this side is your working life and the arrows for both are going that way so if I'm at like I'm not working super hard right now I'm kind of relaxed I'm like on top of myself I'm like at the far end on the very outside of this end of the seesaw that means I'm allowed to and I'm probably working not that much because I'm doing a lot in my personal life so I'm at the far end I am at the top of the scale of like yeah having a good time if I need to come in on the work scale a bit more to the middle i.e towards the more like intense this guy needs to come in to meet it and keep it balanced and so there will be moments where like at the moment there's a lot going on I'm in like hyper work mode and my then like personal life personal like kind of uh pressures on myself to be doing loads and exercising loads and achieving loads of things my personal life needs to come in to meet where i'm at for my work and i don't want to be here all the time and i can't be and no one can so i spend my life basically trying to find the balance on that scale that i'm happy with and rarely it's here because unless i'm like on holiday um sometimes it has to be and then most of the time it's kind of in the middle yeah but i just have to check myself and well my boyfriend checks me most of the time because i'm like yeah perfect i'm gonna go and like make that person's wedding cake and i'm gonna run another women and wine event and i'm gonna do this and he's like whoa can you relax but like you i'm like no it's me like i'm this is the person i am is doing loads and loads of things um so i'm definitely no model for like oh yeah just do it and like it'll always be perfect because that's just not the truth no but i'm a big believer in if you've got the energy and you're blessed with the giracell bunny gene which we are yeah then fucking use it because you You can do some really cool things.

31:10Also, I also then don't come home from work and, like, completely crash. Yeah. I then, like, unload the dishwasher. I then put a wash on. And then, like, oh, meal prep tomorrow. Okay, let's get my bag ready. I need to wash my hair, so I'll wash it tonight. And then I'll, you know, put my socks and my knickers out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I go to sleep. Like, there's no off. Like, even in my, like, off period. Like, even, like, so I'm going on holiday in two. It's, I can't wait. We're going to type Machu Picchu. Unreal. And it's, like, that is my holiday. But that's not fucking off for the normal average human being.

31:35they'd be like what we're in like going to Dubai and sitting on beach clubs worst nightmare like you couldn't pay me honestly it's like a running joke in my house where my boyfriend's like oh we should just go and like lie on a beach you'd love that like oh my god um so like to me that is that is turning off yeah like yes it'll be intense and whatever the body but like I'm fit I'll be fine I can hike it I'm sure I think for me and maybe this is another way of answering the question for me bit like there isn't really as you say like there isn't really an off I love a relaxed day every now and then but like I'm not even my relaxed day I'm not prioritizing and like totally down a food shop and totally like that's my chill yeah yeah 100 % um but I guess the way that I find balance is through diversity of what I'm doing yeah what kills me is monotony like if I'm doing the same thing every day or and it's sometimes why through work I can reach burnout because if it feels like all I'm working on super intensely is the same thing or project that starts to crush me whereas it's why I love the role that I have overseeing culinary and marketing allows me to like every day is like in terms of what I'm doing it'll be like 30 minutes thinking about like the career development of this person in my team or who we need to hire to like better facilitate recipe development then it's thinking about um like the next marketing campaign that we're going to do around our food menu launch or whatever.

33:06Next thing, it's going to be thinking about our brand strategy for next year and how I'm going to brief that into my head of brands so that she's able to deliver that. Next thing, it'll be looking at the store design of our store in Batty Power Station and saying, no, we need to move the oven to there so that the team can work better in that environment. Next thing, it'll be training my food safety manager on systems that we have in place that I've built that she's now taking over. and I get to like, I literally get to segment my day into so many things, which like on the one hand is exhausting, but equally it's like, if I'm, if I'm able to do that, which my brain just kind of is, which is awesome, um, then I want to do that.

33:44Yeah. Yeah. I can't relate more to a human. Basically like I'm so the same. And, um, so the food of the Salad Project, where does your food come from literally literally the ingredients so we have obviously various wholesalers right yeah we've got like eight suppliers yeah um so from day one i've built relationships with all of our suppliers i have super close relationships with them i manage our supply chain so they're like they're like my mates in that it's the most unexpected turn in my career that i have these like super great relationships with you know the veg supplier down in covent garden market Oscar has been with us since Spitalfields maybe not literally day one but like day two of the salad project he's been on that journey with me um and like calling up him is like calling up a cousin and asking for a favor so I I manage those relationships in terms of where the food comes from um so we source all of our vegetables from basically wherever they are in season so initially way back when we were brainstorming the salad project which was then called project s and that was because it was s for salad sustainability and i can never remember the third one like style or something but it's not yeah yeah along those lines yeah and uh the and we were like how can we be as sustainable as possible and i was like fresh out of bali malu which is you you uh do all of your culinary training on an 100 acre organic farm and so you are literally picking the vegetables and you're only cooking things that are in season um and you're only using ingredients that have come from like the localist possible source of them um which is amazing and it's how so many amazing restaurants in london are able to function as the business that we are which is a qsr where people come in every single day expecting the same thing um we can't do that because it would mean we would have to buy up loads of tomatoes that come from greenhouses in the uk which is actually less sustainable and growing them outside in europe um we'd have to buy them all up during summer and then we'd have to like oven dry them or sun dry them but obviously we don't have enough sun in the uk and keep them through the winter periods like it wouldn't work for our model so we need to adapt and buy from where we can um but we buy like the best produce that our business able to buy um we work with a business called collective who supply all of our proteins um and they are amazing they were basically founded to provide a sustainable solution to wholesalers um and not just do you yeah they're my customers they're mega so molly is our account director and again she's been with us since spittle fields she's my like gal in the supply chain i don't get i know that in fmcg you'll have and i see it because i'm in our whatsapp chats but i very rarely have people within my corner of the industry women who I can chat with and kind of and share thoughts with and worries or experiences or whatever um just because it is like quite a niche corner of the industry and we're all in competition with each other because it's so niche um Molly's one of those women where I'm like finally I like yeah I have like my gal who's also the only woman in this area of the world my number one yeah yeah um so that's where all of our protein comes from um and that's all delivered with like last mile uh eco-friendly delivery so i get my monthly reports on uh what we've saved in terms of carbon output every month um and then we work with like fun producers of different products so for things like when we did our bold bean um oh i love partnership we worked with amelia and the bold bean team we actually got them listed on collective so that now they're a permanent um product on our menu so our bold bean satay has stayed on the menu as a hot premium since then over like two years so we now buy that through collective as well um and then yeah we get dry goods down from like uh they come in from dorset um every day on delivery for us and like the the the one non-negotiable for me in terms of my supply chain is it's what can i buy that facilitates us cooking in a way that you can emulate at home so I don't buy in any products that have loads of stabilizers or emulsifiers or or that are ultra processed or pre-processed we buy ingredients that you would have in your cupboard at home we just buy them bigger and we make everything in every site every day so whether it's flavors for our chicken it's all ingredients that your grandma would recognize which is like the most important thing for me yeah and so it's it's balancing that with a conversation I had with someone recently about restaurants it was the founder of cricket i was listening to him talking it was really interesting him talking about how um in the early stage of a business you obviously have lots of personal principles or goals in terms of sustainability but you have to balance them with business practicalities yeah like sometimes it's not it's not practical it's not an option it's if you've got customers who want your product and they love your product obviously i'd love for everything that we serve to be organic but it's not realistic for us because no business can buy fully organic all the time yeah um so anyway we're now at a point where we're like luckily hopefully in the next couple of years i'll start to see our business settled into a place where we can we have even more buying power that allows us to really make principled buying decisions um but for now we buy good produce from good people and we make everything fresh in house so that it's as good as it possibly could be definitely that red lights one isn't it on that camera no you're joking no stop um so we were talking about suppliers where it came from oh yeah what would you say um is one of like your kind of biggest like memorable moments has been at seller project and what are you most proud of oh that's so tough because there's so many memorable moments like good and bad uh i'd have to say and i never liked saying this one because it wasn't all three of us there was only two of us there because Flo was on holiday he might have even been like proposing to his wife at the time but we in our first year um at Spitalfields in the time when we were literally us three working night and day in the store to serve salads we um won uber eats restaurant of the year wow and so that meant me for the final I had to cook a salad which is like there's no like super impressive feat but it was I guess reflective of everything all the work that we put into that business um i had to like present a salad to prue leith that's quite cool yeah oh my god it was like the coolest thing for me ever i was like honestly i thought i was gonna die i was so excited i like presented my cookie to her as well and i was like i can't make it i'm gonna make it yeah yeah i know such a friday treat um but yeah we won and so james and i were at the awards ceremony which was in old street at the top of this hotel right opposite the office that i used to work in before I then had quit to go to culinary school and we didn't know that we'd won and there was this whole announcement and I honestly I could not believe it there were other businesses in there that have been around for like 10-15 years who I knew who they were I buy food from them and we won and we won a hundred thousand pounds and it was this massive check that's a massive amount of money it's a huge amount of money so that went into found like our second store the bank store um at like helping with the fit out and yeah we won and that was like I can remember every moment of that night I mean we got obviously totally pissed um I just had the best time ever and we called Flo and we had the check and he was out for dinner with his family and they all got champagne and that was magic yeah and going into the see the team the next day I took down bottles of champagne for them um and like all of these presents because obviously so much of it was what they have done as well um so that was a really memorable moment another super memorable moment was i mean every store opening is memorable but opening the bank store i.e our like first multiple site if that makes sense was huge um the rest of the stores whenever they open it's it's an awesome day but and i do have to i'm really bad and we're actually just really bad as a team generally i think at stopping and celebrating the wins oh i know we went past store 10 which i had when we hit like five I was like imagine the day we opened our 10th store and we literally opened it we're like you right yeah no not too bad it's going well yeah yeah yeah and then like go back to the office and that night my friend was like so how many is that and I was like oh that was our 10th which you'd think would be like a big milestone and you just kind of like because so in the day today literally we had a store only two weeks later so we're like on to the next one um and then final best thing would have to be when the book published um that as i kind of mentioned at the like start this pod has been a life dream for me didn't know how it would happen in what context i'm gonna pick dinner from it tonight i used to run a bakery and i thought that maybe it would be a cake book like no idea and maybe it still will one day but this is like my dream come to life and so when that launched i yeah i can't explain the feeling seeing it in a waterstones or in different bookshops seeing people buy it seeing friends or people i don't know send me photos of what they've been cooking that is a mega yeah yeah i mean you have a book i know physical i genuinely cannot believe it yeah someone came into the matrival the other day and was like wait i was just like i opened the store at 7 a.m so i was like serving in my cap and apron and all this and she was like hey i recognize your face i was like oh wow no you're quite famous No, I'm not I think you don't know how famous you are You're actually like, you're actually like beenock That is, you're making me blush No, but like, not true I think you are But she was like, you're the girl in the book Yes, the famous Clem You need to just, you need to know what This is us taking a little moment here To celebrate the win Well, right back at you, Galf Can I ask some financials?

43:53Yeah, I hope I can answer them so like how much money does it cost to open up a salad project bar um about half a million pounds per site varies massively whoa i didn't give you that much i don't know you'd be much it didn't give you 500k yeah yeah yeah wow yeah and then revenue i'm so i like how i'm i know you're doing phenomenally but i can't put a number to it like what is kind of like what are you circa doing um i don't know how much i'm allowed to share um but what's the best number that i would probably you're allowed to say like over five mil or something like that yeah yeah upward over 10 mil a year okay wow yeah that's so exciting yeah i so what costs the most in terms of fitting at shop like what is it oh i mean everything costs loads of money like i know that's a really weird bad way of saying it but kitchen equipment bonkers i mean like a warming uh like we've we've now implemented for both like food safety and food quality purposes when you take something out of the oven the oven itself costs like 12 grand then you take something out of the oven and rather than just putting it on racks you put it in this heated cupboard so that it like all stays at safe temperature um and one of the like we've rolled that out across all the sites in the past like six months because we were testing it and trying like out with our recipes and that kind of stuff and one of those again is another like 15 grand um so that's just like the tiniest part of it like a walk-in fridge is like the size of your kitchen just fully refrigerated yeah yeah yeah um the chiller the flooring the walls um extract whenever we move into a site that doesn't have extract that adds on like a horrific amount of money okay because you basically have to build in an extraction system that takes all of your air up to the roof so that you're not like building smells into the building environment around you um the design the design of our stores is unreal we work with this amazing we work with this amazing woman called rain um who has been with us since our third store i think oxford circus was the first that she designed so spitfields and bank are like our kind of babies back in the day we're using a different team um and then rain came in and has just made everything so cool and so beautiful so she works super closely also with I had a brand who's now really involved in giving kind of ideas and thoughts on the design um but like they all have to look beautiful so all of the materials that go into that it's like you know amazing woods um it's why it's honestly why I hope the team don't mind me saying this but we use a lot of stainless steel stainless steel is is yes expensive but also like as materials could go it's generally an easy one to roll out without too much expense yeah yeah yeah um so yeah every corner of the store costs fuck loads of money.

46:36Also like you're not opening in, I mean maybe you will in the future but you've chosen to open in probably one of the most expensive real estate locations ever. Like what's rent in London now I actually don't know but like yearly millions? 100 grand a year. No. Okay no that's probably stupid. That's ridiculous idea. But no. But 100k? Like if you're in like a major travel hub like half a mill a year on rent. So like at London Bridge site you're looking and a half a mil not london bridge but like uh like ast pancras or a king's cross kind of vibe yeah wow yeah it's money so okay question quickly on funding how is it like the boys initially friends and family right um like back at the start of the business and then we work with um a fabulous group of basically personal private investors yeah um and so they've a lot of them have been with us again from day one um and so those are private individuals who have an interest in hospitality particularly um or not but a lot of them do um so that's the way that we've funded up till this point and all of our sites are profitable so we feed in all of our own profits into the next sites in the next year of openings which leads me very nicely onto my penultimate question what's next for seller project like how many sites are we talking like world domination are you expanding you're going overseas world domination big time um yeah again i can't share too much but we are um we're looking at national expansion as everyone is yeah um so that will hopefully be next year and um international yeah that's so exciting well i can't wait to see you like grow all over the gap yeah all over london all over i know but there's so and also like you have a phenomenal product as i've said so many times and you're like reacting to customer needs it's exactly what we want and it's like it's funny like obviously oh my last question go for it did you find the right falafel supplier i lost sleep over it clen that's so funny yeah so i put out a request on this group chat that i have that saves me quite often when i'm looking for bizarre products yeah gift to the girls gift to the girls it's me and ellen from candy kittens love it oh yeah of course because the event was the other week yeah oh yeah thank you also for completely doing our salads everyone was obsessed we got so many more people to hang out and stay because we were like we've got salad for dinner love it and then we said it's salad project they're like oh yeah i'm actually gonna like i'm free now and i'm like yeah funny that salad's so jokes um yes i put out this message being like where does anyone know where i can get any good falafel because there are lots of amazing falafel businesses out there lots of them selling into supermarkets that we'll all know the brands of um but there's just always something slightly different between what you need in uh like a restaurant setting or in a qsr setting versus what's made for like consumers at home or supermarket shelves um anyway we didn't end up finding a brand we have developed our own recipe right and we have them freshly fried by the guys who they we don't do that in store because we can't have fryers yeah in our leases we can only cook inside the oven um but our guys who whip up our dressings for us every day because there's liters and liters and liters of dressings getting made um they freshly fry our falafel for okay nice but that's going to launch on the 20th of october so that's coming in the new menu drop yeah which lands on the 20th um and i think the falafel are delicious but do you know whoever said on the chat um i can't remember which girl it was in the end but when she said about the papel ones oh yeah yeah they are yeah fucking delicious oh my god totally i actually i took ours home and i gave them to my boyfriend and he's like eating all of these left i've been cooking for the past like month to get ready ready for this menu launch and i built this whole bowl of all of the leftovers from our shoot recently and i was like do you like the falafel how's the falafel going down he was like yeah yeah it's good i prefer the pill pill one i was like yes fine they are a falafel business there's always going to be the best do they do hog sale no don't think so because i think like everything's like fresh done like in their kitchen because it's not a model is it yeah it's not so good like and it's why I'm always jury for me is always out on falafel we used to serve falafel back in back in the olden days of the salad project we literally like hand molded and baked falafel um and they were awful but we took them off the menu and so many people were like where is the we were like guys no one bought it was really bad but some people were like that was the only reason I came to the salad project I'm not coming anymore so that happens every menu change yeah we get the same with coconut yeah they're still changed they're like oh my god it was no one bought it you're lying you're the one person um so anyway it's back and i like i think the salad is delicious i hope it does really well i just am always so like i'm hard to please with falafel and so we don't have the perfect solution but i think it's good enough and it's very tasty and um what's the bestseller bestseller oh great question so historically the bestseller has always been the goat which is what anytime anyone bumps into me and they're like oh my god i'm obsessed with the seller project the goat is i'll be like what do you get the goat obviously and i know that they're always going to say that however and this is i'm so thrilled about this because i launched protein bowls back in april huge bit of work and really exciting moment to build a totally new product and like new category on our menu um and the Caesar protein bowl which you had for lunch today I love it is our best-selling product it's delicious yeah and it's the dressing and also I'm as you say like I eat a lot like I eat I mean way more than my boyfriend like I can put it away yeah so I need like a fat lunch like you and a fat dinner and a fat breakfast and I snack yeah I do have bits in between yeah but that fills me up like I genuinely love it but I don't need a snack and that is unheard of which is so good for the ox of an appetite that I have but that's so great because when we launched it I was really worried that only men were going to buy the protein balls because they are massive and actually I love it when I hear women who buy it and they're like yeah I'm really busy all the time and I'm burning energy like you wouldn't believe because I know way more fucking busy women than I do men no offence oh yeah that's a whole other story they're great super intelligent super successful lots of people that I know love it but they're not like running around like maniacs they also can't multitask their brain doesn't work on 450 different things exactly they're like quite like doing their tasks yeah yeah we need to do that then we'll send that email oh you know i'll actually just wash my hair between that meeting like we're doing so many things and like managing a full couple's social life like everything but yeah that's like another angle i actually hadn't really thought about and it's now like setting all of my marketing like brain wires going because i'm like wow protein balls are also for the busy women like that's so good because i'd also i'd only ever really thought of them and it was why i was actually reticent in the beginning to launch them as protein bowls because again coming back to what i said earlier about i don't buy in too much to nutritional fads yeah because i just i think it's i can tell the crap from the good lots of people can't and that that doesn't sit well with me because it's a it just takes advantage of people massively yeah but i mean protein is great people are exercising so much like it's i there's no bad in in people eating more protein in my opinion so that's fine but what I did think of it when we launched it as protein bowls I was like no women is gonna want this no woman is gonna want this because it just shouts gym bro and my god we get a lot of gym bros buying those protein bowls but as I hear of more and more women who buy them it actually it lights me up because I'm like that's actually I initially wanted it to be named something that did feed in more too it's for the fucking busy days and it's for the like when you need like i go into if i'm really stressed or i've got like a big presentation or a big meeting or whatever my my metabolism goes into like overdrive some people don't they go the other way oh my god snack incoming i'm literally like you just need to keep filling me up because i just empty empty empty some people obviously go the other way and they're like metabolism basically shuts down so they're not hungry at all which is don't go for a protein bowl if that's you um but i love that we now have a product that does actually allow you maybe like on a Monday you you're a bit more relaxed you can go for a salad but if you're like today is a big day how cool is it that like from my product I get to fuel all these people doing sick things in life I think that's like that's the biggest to like add a win I guess to the list of of salad project things that make me feel the best it's I am obsessed and completely passionate about facilitating people doing awesome things i'm every day amazed by people who do awesome things and being able to fuel people to do that and to do it better or to do more of them is a privilege um that was such a good conversation thank you so much for coming on getting to go i've loved it i want to do 2.0 but we're doing 2.0 walk and talk in the matcha bar because we didn't even talk about the matcha bars oh yeah I mentioned it at one point I think you spoke about it but I didn't ask my follow up which was like what?

55:45the matcha bars? is this now going to be rolled out as well? and are they matcha and salad bars? or is it just coffee matcha bars? matcha and salad bars so like predominantly salad bar with a matcha bar in it and so the reason we did it was Notting Hill is our first residential site where we're like ooh we're in a neighbourhood or first neighbourhood site I should say we're in a neighbourhood we want people to come in at all times of day and have like a reason to hang out there the site is beautiful the season is gorgeous nice velvet seats i mean it's it's so sexy lots of walnut wood it's gorge and so if like the only reason to go in there is a salad actually it limits the amount of time people are going to be hanging out there so yeah we've we've built this little uh matcha bar into the corner and it's going really well we're getting loads of love for the matcha bar um it's been a real adventure we literally had like a month to turn that round um and it's been fun i like full hands up didn't really know much about matcha i wouldn't have put myself in a matcha girly kind of camp um and i'm definitely still a coffee gal i'm a coffee but i do like i do but i have time and a place totally i appreciate it way more now and i like i think it looks beautiful which is part of the reason why loads of people love it yeah um but we should go and yeah i guess it's a bit of test and learn if it goes really well then um it's easy enough to fit a pretty small operation of matcha into uh like future stores and so potentially it could be i'm looking at how we can start to think about more like innovative ways of serving the matcha i.e like on draft cold foamy energy which would allow us to do it in a way more condensed space yeah which could mean that we can like retroactively fit it into a lot of our existing sites yeah so fun yeah oh my god i can't thank you so much for coming on i'm gonna make all of the goods tonight for dinner um yeah thank you so much for having me