22 Laws of Food & Drink Marketing You've Probably Never Heard Before - Rory Sutherland

1:26:28Yeah. Yeah. So he gets out of this trolley, walks around, and I'm just like, I was just like, I just got on the flight, I was sober as a fucking judge at this point. I imagine that sobers you up. Yeah, yeah, it does. And I was just like, let's just get this over and done with like, just, just, I just want to go home or get to the apartment. And he pulls up 12 bottles. Yeah. 12 bottles. Of Don Julio. Don Julio tequila. Scans them all through. And then last minute, which I actually found quite hilarious. He just put some chewing gum on. It's like, you're going to mug me and you're going to ask some chewing gum as well.

1:27:01And so I paid for that. And then he, he got in the, go in the car. And at that kind of point, I just knew it was a bit of a, it was a. so by paying for the don julio had you it was about 750 quid oh right it's serious yeah it's ridiculous bottles but it was um it was uh it was it was a wild experience but but yes so that happened but where i was originally starting was the food in columbia so the food in santa marta was um was repugnant like and i was just which was the food in car India was amazing but in Santa Marta, this other seaside town, which as you said, was like, as your wife says, it's like watching Narcos, right?

1:27:41Got mugged there as well, but I won't tell you about that, but that's the same sort of thing. But I was like, I just need some sort of normality. I need, and I saw the finger-licking good signs. I saw the KFC, the kind of, the lurid lights. Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, that's the promise. And as you were saying about your friend at the University of Sussex, because it's like, we're waiting for that kind of, what we expect. And we're almost like speeding it up. what we actually get well i can remember a similar experience getting stuck in quite heavy snow crossing the rockies between terrace new mexico and farmington new mexico and all i can remember is we were terrified because there's no mobile signal if you went off the road this was a road where it's it's incomprehensible to brits but you're driving through northern new mexico and you will go for 40 miles without seeing a car or a house or a building of any kind you know once after about 50 miles you'd come across a truck stop you go another 50 miles not a single house just wood and the snow was falling and the temperature was dropping and i was convinced we're gonna you know because it was getting increasingly snowy we weren't in a four by four wiggling off the road i remember finally getting into farmington and seeing a sign saying burger king and it was seriously it was it was my reaction was you know it was like the promised land you yes at last yes yes and um and and of course we've got to understand of course with food that there is the food that gets written about which is the food that is remarkably good okay typically yeah most of the time when we eat our deepest unconscious psychology isn't attempting to uh effectively use food as a form of status signaling or a form of math you know extraordinary entertainment it's actually is this okay to eat yeah that's that's our evolutionary instinct it's you know basically the great thing about they were they'll say i call this this is called satisficing okay yes and the reason mcdonald's is so successful is not because it's the best restaurant in the world yes and those um uh it's because it's um it's incredibly good at not being bad so when you go there you know what you get it's going to be entirely expected it's going to be very predictable the bun has been toasted for one minute and 39 seconds there are no surprises it's exactly what luck as it was last time it's exactly what you expect it to be and as a consequence it's a very very successful mind hack because you know Nassim Talib writes about this he was baffled to see people eating at McDonald's at Milan railway station you know Milan pretty good foodie city and the point was the people weren't looking for great food they were looking for food that definitely wasn't bad but but also that's that we talked about the promise the promised land so i eventually go to this kfc in san san san mata and i'm craving it i the food arrives i get this i get the full full shebang i get wings i get tenders i get fucking everything it was horrendously bad it was the chicken was rank the kfc and i was like i couldn't believe it but what in terms of like the promise and then we know you know we've talked about like we want these things the kind of what we've got in our head and the expectation to be met with it with a chain when you when it is kind of that you have to be absolutely you know this was i suppose ray crock's great you know insight you have to be absolutely fascistically consistent in what you deliver yeah and i mean it might have been a fake kfc or else the local franchisee has gone rogue i don't but but so then to your point but this one thing you notice when you try mcdonald's or and or burger king in a different country is you have the similarities of home but the difference yes yes and i've always found that how you keep consistency yet let yet tailor a tailorized localized markets that conundrum fascinating the mcdonald's i got mcdonald's delivery on uh rappy which is their equivalent of deliveroo yeah i i was like i may as well be an ejaculate when i was eating it because it was so it was exactly it was i could have gone down to um the mcdonald's in liverpool street do you mean it was exactly the same i was like and that is the promise i wanted do you mean of course of course and that that and of course that's also true of hotel chains yeah that we forget you know if you're a frequent hotel stayer quite often what you want is absolute predictability you want to walk in and you know you know how the shower works you you know you don't you don't have that battle of kind of uh you know confronting surprises or unexpected components you know to the experience and actually you know this this concept of satisficing which was coined by a guy called herbert simon i was kind of polymathics won the new world prize for economics um interestingly but his um a surprisingly interesting person to win the award actually um but um he um uh he interestingly made the point that in making decisions under uncertainty his old sort of shtick was decision making under uncertainty the avoidance of a negative probably looms larger than the attainment of a positive you know yes yeah um and uh it is um it's a useful tool to understand human behavior because everybody in human but in describing their own behavior always talks about i chose this because it was the best and actually it probably isn't the best okay you buy a samsung television not because for the same money you might not be able to get a slight you know you probably could get a slightly better television but there's a 10 5 whatever it is risk with that other television that it might be a piece of shit yes you know and actually avoiding buying a bad television is much more important uh both i think that's why sub subway successful because i mean i will uh uh so so for example with coffee there's pret there's gales there's black street black coffee there's there's not many um sub there's obviously sandwich chains like prep there's not many sub sandwich chains other than subway so everyone going there is probably satisficing something because it's not like that but whereas a sandwich shop could be i mean it's literally like a that's one thing that hasn't like you know it's literally a roll of the dice you're in a new town you fancy a sandwich there isn't a if you go to subway you know exactly what you're getting you know exactly what you're getting you have kind of some kind of agency over what you put in it whether you put yeah i think some fancy restaurants make the mistake of i think you should have one or two unchanging staples on a menu yep and maybe they make the mistake of being so keen to kind of you know over stimulate their customers but quite a lot of the time actually knowing that a restaurant has well if the worst comes to the worst i can always have the x because i know weirdly interestingly my didn't you say you just write something about a burger or something why the burger is the best seller or something well yeah there's a wonderful phrase coined by a london ad agency called um ddb adam and eve and their phrase is what they call the burger effect that when you look at a menu once you've seen the burger it's difficult to get past it that's that's their view that you have those things that are very sticky it's interesting that nearly all places do a burger now don't they because people who can't decide are always you know it's it's rare to have a burger that's actually bad not impossible um but there's also the thing i think that a lot of restaurants do i stopped going to wagamama because there were various things there that were absolute staples so i didn't always eat them but i i knew i always enjoyed them there was something called surrender's curry which was fantastic and there was a hot coconut based noodle soup which was quite spicy i can't remember what the hell it was called now but they took them both off the menu since when i haven't been back to wagamama in about three years because now i don't know whether you know i go there i go well it might not be anything i like there yeah it's uh it's it's it's crazy when they take away those those things that you that you like you love so so just back to these actually that's an interesting measure because restaurants don't have that metric they know what's selling okay but they don't unless they have a loyalty card which i suppose kfc and mcdonald's do they don't know what's selling repeatedly that's why supermarkets want a loyalty card because if you talk to for example um the people at ocado where they don't need a lot of card because they know exactly what everybody's buying they they actually apply two valuations to the items at ocado there's how much it sells and there's how much it repeatedly sells to the same people yeah so repeat purchase will keep something stocked at ocado even if the overall volume sales might not seem to justify it and the reason for that is that apart from anything else if there's something you really like that you can only get at ocado you'll end up doing a whole hundred pound shop at ocado just to get the actually irwin's soda bread i don't know if you're a fan of yeah well that's that's okay there are a few things to cado there are a few korean things there's a korean hot horse which ocado sells and 50 of the reason i order from ocado is because i know i can get those things there and i can't get them anywhere else yeah that's that's why so the bulk of our listeners are brands doing that i actually think i think that's i think that's a really interesting thing if you get something which is a staple yeah that's what i was going to ask you about so so sat supermarkets are the mecca of physical supermarkets are the mecca of satisficing you have go down a lidl or a waitrose or a sainsbury's most people even if you're whether a young professional with a small basket or you're a mum with a big trolley and a toddler in the front you're going through habitually buying the things not nine times out of ten so you're getting the peanut butter you always buy you're getting the uh the sweet there are different segments there is a segment with a cardo i'll give away there but that you know there there is a highly adventurous segment yes within the buying and actually of course that will vary according to context as well yes but a lot of the time depending on your level of price constraint your level of risk taking you're absolutely right most people most of the time are you know 50 of the population effectively lead a kind of hand-to-mouth existence and this is yes something i'd like to do something about where essentially life is a cash flow problem it's not a wealth problem it's a cash flow problem and in that case you have a very strong incentive to buy things that you've bought before even more so if you have kids yes okay so a rich household can try and get their kids to try new foods and if they don't like the food you can chuck it away if you're a poor household exactly the same with a cat you don't take a risk with your brand of cat food because if you vary the brand of cat food and the cat just won't eat it you've just wasted a few quid yeah so you buy the same cat food same with kids so how how so in terms of the adoption curve right so you have brands who are starting you know like the chocolate i sent you and i can get you some more of that as well by the way um that was sensational so so that is that's expensive it's for waitrose shopper right yeah it's it's venturous it's expensive it's premium so that that brand is may struggle is we'll get to a point where you probably get the hipsters who are buying it you'll get the the mums who've got money you also you also have a group of people they're famously um one of the first things i learned well it must be in my first week in advertising sales of fairy liquid go up at christmas um because people have guests in the house and they want to be seen buying a premium brand so people people um people effectively the affording hospitality will tend to uptick.

1:39:39They'll tend to premiumise, and they might go to a deli rather than just going to an ordinary shop. Yeah. Well, shopping now has changed. Yeah. So it's kind of, again, back to this middle ground we've been talking about. I actually had some people round, and I went to Gale's to pick up an order just because people were just coming around for tea, and we wanted scones and everything. And they do pretty good scones. but gales interest me because there's something wrong i i the food product is pretty good i think you'll agree there's something wrong with their queuing system isn't there do you do you experience the same thing that the the the whole thing is a bit of a mess that you're you know you're not quite sure whether you actually take the bread off the shelf or whether you ask for the bread and then there are people in front of you who are asking for coffee and if they have a large coffee order it then holds you up yeah so there's something fucked about that yeah but you know you know what last time we talked about gratuitous perversity a lot of the people in gales the clientele i like i like the brand i like the business the clientele are some fucking annoying people you know they're the kind of audi drivers of the um well i so i go my local ones cobham so you get a lot of the chelsea footballers and you get uh it looks like a sort of a botox horse yeah what's going on there it's bizarre it is bizarre but one thing they've done a couple of things well so i i think um you know we were talking last time about gratuitous perversity so like doing something to kind of fuck people off but it does psychologically some reason does thing well they've well the interesting one i i don't know if i mentioned this last time i've often thought it was an interesting idea there's this fantastic place which is where five guys got the idea from their fry for their fries from yeah they went and studied this place called thrashers in ocean city maryland which has three branches it just sells fries it sells them in a kind of yes you've told about this yeah and the interesting thing this is really weird if you think about it for the u.s they don't give you ketchup yes you can have vinegar and you can have salt and that's it now that's not so weird to brits for americans saying no ketchup that's you know that's a real kind of weirdness doing these things that so so on the gail's point is they want to feel so i've i've interviewed the founder of popham's bakery which is one of the best bakeries up in north london but it's just two sites two sites got it yeah two sites and we were talking kind of before we hit record and mention them because don't we'll venture capital will take it over and open 400 sites and then ruin it last time we were talking about how scale kills magic we'll get onto that again in a sec but one of the things i said to me you're going to open any more sites you've got three sites he goes no we're going to keep our we're going to keep these three bakeries and we're going to do a brand bounce which is so go into something completely different so what they've done is they've leveraged they've got the amazing fucking uh croissants and pastries and pastas that again due to scarcity sells out perfectly on time at 1 p.m every day which means there's always queues queues status blah blah blah good concept brand bounce by the way brand bounce but then what they've done of brand bounce is caterpillar which make heavy moving equipment moving into but what they've done is they've gone into homeware because homeware is infinitely scalable the popham's brand is strong people want a nice coffee uh cup to drink out of and i was like that's genius because you could logic would say go and open other 10 sites around london and you could sell it online which you can't do with baked goods exactly by definition exactly but then so that was their point but what he was saying about gales is their genius is that they feel outside of london again opening one in i think they opened one where did i see them open one in uh let's just say and cheshire's not the best example but but seven oaks as well yeah seven yeah so that woking there's one in woking that in in woking that feels like oh my god this is a neighborhood bakery so i think back to that gratuitous perversity point is just like maybe the the kind of the the fact it's a bit cataclysmic the queuing system versus a starbucks adds a sort of neighborhoodness to it one but then two every single gales looks different so they're not carbon copy so the one i went to the one in i was in finsbury park uh last week that is totally different that's all pink and neon the versus the one in cobham versus the one in woking so i think what they're trying to do is build this neighborhood feel we have scale we have this thing because of course it's different outside london versus inside we have this chain in kent called elite pubs which is very similar which is they're all uh there is no common branding you have to go to the website to discover which is an elite pub and which isn't you know if you were really really alert you'd probably recognize similarities i mean they don't you know not everything is completely reinvented but fundamentally they do quite a high degree of sort of customization to the individual building and the area and so it's it's quite an interesting it's quite an interesting concept because it's it is it it has the economies of scale of a chain pub but it has the appearance to the consumer of a local Do you know who's done this really well is Honest Burgers.

1:44:39Interesting. So actually, I should introduce you to him. So he's now doing a degree in behavioural economics. He's a fascinating guy. He's creating a piece of AI. They're very, very highly rated, aren't they? Well, extremely highly. I've never had one, actually. You've never had Honest Burgers? No, no, no, no, no. They're so good. But what they've done, they've done a few things that is against kind of solved the scale kills magic conundrum. So first thing is they have the consistency of Burgers. they have this kind of rule which is 90 % systems. So you have all the systems in place of a big restaurant.

1:45:12They have this almost 10 % rule which allows for a bit of fuckery. So they all let employees, even though they're not there, say in Honest in Brighton or Honest in Toting, a bit like Julie Metcalfe's giveaway a free coffee when you like. They've got the agency to plop down a bottle of tequila and say, look, help yourselves, have a few shots. just keeps his magic again it could fuck up it could fuck up because i remember always being coming from a provincial background i grew up in you know said a sort of small town in the welsh borders i went to university and there was no university food on sunday sunday lunchtime and a group of us got into the ritual of always going to pizza express i always had the fear and tea now i think um it was just every sunday basically went to lunch and pizza express yes and the one thing i did grumble about after doing this for practically two years admittedly only during term time and what i didn't realize of course is to the people working there we're a bunch of students here today gone tomorrow but at no point do they kind of recognize our regular custom by going don't worry you can have some free garlic bread and i always thought you know on visit number 10 that's getting a bit weird you know what i mean it's always absolutely fine you always got exactly what you wanted but it kind of you know if you'd been there literally 10 weeks in a row you something in the natural human perception of value exchange and fairness and relatedness expects the acknowledgement of your past custom and so it's very sensible way they could at honest burgers just effectively use that discretionary thing is if you have someone who comes back with their kids quite often just give you know give the kids a balloon they do they do funny things as well they they they again back to gratuitous perversity is they they won't allow folks so what what phil and tom were saying to me hit me with this so they won't allow folks so so because again there's it pisses customers off they did a couple of things really well so a bit they they they realize your fries with your hands their whole point one of their values is food food is connected they believe when you eat something with your hands it connects your food to your soul and he was saying give you wipes afterwards i think they give you wipes but they've got again it's gratuitous but it doesn't really make sense but they were saying there was absolute uproar when they opened in chiswick you can imagine all the uh the kind of the push mums and the investment banks on the weekend where are the fucking fools you know what i mean um so they do that but then this is where it gets really interesting because that was my weird thing about opening bacon sandwich yes where you you would offer brown sauce but no ketchup exactly of sheer willful perversity exactly and it's kind of it's a bit of a kind of mini marco pierre white isn't it which is if people ask for salt or pepper he'd have a you know he'd have an absolute wobbly you see exactly and it's actually a little bit of saying uh it's a way of signaling that we have our own opinion about this food and we're doing this for reasons other than simple naked capitalist greed in other words not being completely customer focused in certain things does have i mean you know i don't i don't recommend it as a default position you know i don't recommend that you know uh organizations become willfully perverse all the time in everything it would get really really annoying but it's something you can deploy you know in a very you have to do it in a limited way the well the other thing they do is to keep the localization and keep the feeling of we are not a chain even though there are 50 sites is every single uh honest burger site will have a unique burger local to that so manchester will have cheese from lancashire uh yeah uh the like that yeah which is and he said to me he goes our accountant hates us because we're we're doing stuff for this fucking one burger which we may not sell part of and i was like and he was like but we don't care we want that waitress does that actually so in waitress in wales not that there many of them uh there's one in monmouth they have the little local produce aisle which is really nice and it actually got into private because someone wasn't paying much attention to shelf stacking and he said local welsh produce and there are a load of bananas which don't grow very well in wales to be absolutely honest um but um i don't know where they got that idea from but uh no and those kind of little bits of um and actually you'll see that in in the design being adopted by starbucks when they open new stores in what house they've gone from staff in a sense okay if it's a bit like mcdonald's making playing around with its logo by using it for directions you know first on the left and then use the golden arch as just a kind of arrow um you when you're when you're very well established you can afford and in fact it's beneficial to play around with your own sense of identity in other words you abandon the absolutely rigorous algorithmic does attention to rules in design.

1:50:12And you do variations on a theme. And so what Starbucks is doing is, if they open a Starbucks in New Mexico now, it won't look like a Starbucks in Connecticut. You know, they'll deliberately add some local elements or some customization. Now, it's worth noting that you probably, you shouldn't be doing that in the early stages, perhaps. But when you are established, you can afford to have that kind of, you know to play fast and loose with your own kind of rules a little bit that's the one thing i was going to ask you actually is have you do you know charlie munger who's of course he died recently unfortunately one of the great one of his rules that i absolutely love is this inversion rule so basically always invert always invert yeah and i was writing about this in my newsletter so he he does the famous commencement speech at university of southern california and he basically says um he's asked to do a talk to a kind of bug-eyed wide-eyed american students and he goes this is how to live a life of misery.

1:51:10I think the five things he's like, inhale alcohol and chemicals, be resentful and envious, be unreliable, and don't stand on the shoulders and do not stand on the shoulders of others, i.e. learn from those mistakes. Do those five things and you'll live a life of misery. So the whole point is, his famous quote is, wisdom is prevention. So if you avoid those things, you will live a good life. And I've been thinking about that. so like i've added some for myself as i rush everywhere so when i rush i'm just like i'm not enjoying my life basically so so one of my things if i if i rush everywhere but i would love to apply this to brand building and food so like what would you say uh like the if we're using the rule of inversion what are the ways a brand could absolutely fuck itself so say say say we were to kind of cannibal um to take how how could coca-cola essentially dismantle themselves with the inversion rules like what were the things they'd have to do this is similar to a game that was this was in this is similar to a game that was invented by a guy called jeremy bulmore i think who was a great creative guy at the agency jay walter thompson and he called this brandicide which is i love that in order to discover what a brand is one useful mode of inquiry is what you might call to decide what the brand isn't and all i can remember is you've got to remember this was the 1980s and you had after eight mints as a sort of premium after dinner mint sold by round trees in the little individual envelopes you know that yeah i know i love them yeah and the question was um what would you do if you wanted to kill the um after eight brand and the first suggestion was uh you introduce a um after eight chewing gum okay you move the brand in and then someone decided they thought that actually an upmarket mint flavored chewing gum might actually do quite well and then someone else suggested after eight bubble gum okay and that's the kind of that that's the kind of piece of brand aside you know it's so totally inappropriate to what the brand is about um and what's interesting about mcdonald's actually is that it's it is innovated significantly but it's always gone to the adjacent possible so what the mistake that mcdonald's hasn't made is it's introduced screen ordering and it's introduced table service but it hasn't removed face-to-face ordering and it hasn't removed order at the counter now what a lot of supermarkets have done is they've gone god it's cheaper to actually have self-service checkout self-checkout than it is to have people so we're going to have really few tills and we're going to have loads and loads of self-service checkout okay now i think okay this is an example of where i think companies get it really badly wrong which is their whole areas of company decision making which are made by procurement or by the finance function with no input from marketing okay uh which are made entirely on the basis of financial expediency with no consideration given for the customer experience so an example of this is when you park at my local m &s now m &s has got a lot of things right recently and they're undoubtedly on a bit of a role the new chief executive who comes from a very strong lifetime retailer um uh you know what do you think they've got right like because what yeah what just quality of food general general the clothing they finally uh started to crack clothing i think they still make a few mistakes i think the uh the the way in which they decorate and lay out the clothing stores is fundamentally inimical to selling premium goods there are certain rules in premium fashion which is you know if you're paying um over the odds for something you want carpets and you don't want industrial lighting above your head and when you pay your 80 quid you want a rope handle bag and i think i think margaret spencer's could learn from that there are certain just heuristic rules you know that i mean you always notice this the first rule of being an upmarket turkish restaurant is you don't sell donor kebabs it slightly anonymous me because i really like the donut kebab yeah i think it's a great great thing yeah but it's now what happens at m &s in seven oaks is that someone no one no one with a marketing or customer focused mindset has any say in this decision and someone says who are we going to get to run the car park because we can't make the car park free because if we do people just part there all day and go shopping in seven oaks or work in seven oaks and the car park will be full so they obviously go to the person who is uh who offers the highest bid to manage the car park okay if you let us collect the money we'll um uh we'll pay you a certain amount of money to manage this car park the person who offers the highest bid is almost certainly likely to be the person most ready to issue fines to people for overstaying or in this case what happens is bear in mind i'm not criticizing m &s here i'm simply showing it as an exemplar of what even really good brands do where they get it wrong by handing decisions out to people who are purely motivated by the financial side of the question and have no responsibility for the consumer experience and that would be the people who who put in lots and lots of self-checkout tills okay which has now led to an epidemic of shoplifting okay but those people can lay claim to the financial saving but they're not around to be responsible for the adverse consequences apart from anything else in waitrose and seven oaks quite a lot of people it's a fairly minted area do a whole weekly shop there it's quite difficult to do a whole weekly shop in a self-checkout till have you seen you need a trolley you need a bloody and i do the self-scanning but there are a lot of people who are over 60 they don't want to get an app and you know and and scanning your own groceries with a bloody mobile phone is a pain in the ass anyway because you need three hands okay now in the m &s car park you come in there's a you pay you use the app to pay for an hour and the app says you have an hour left you drive out after precisely an hour and then you get issued a fine through the post because number plate recognition why because the number plate recognition system judges your duration of parking from entry to exit not from the moment you pay now obviously if you're a bit slow getting out of the car you pay two or three minutes later than you actually enter the car park right yeah now in every single car park whether it's pay and display whether it's an app or whatever which is normally policed by a human being if you pay for an hour you've got an hour from the moment you pay right they don't count the four minutes you were dicking around finding the ticket machine or whatever it is yeah but in this system because it's done by anpr that issue a fine if you if you arrive pay three minutes later and then leave 60 minutes later now locally on my local next door that's driving people apoplectic that you know for a long time i think this is now they finally got rid of it now may still be the case in that same store you needed a pound to have a trolley now nobody carries fucking coins anymore right the luck i do not have a pound on my person at this moment uh i might have one in the car if i remember those Those are the kind of utterly ridiculous things that even great brands do.

1:58:35You know, utterly ridiculous. Because what you've got to remember is that even if 95 % of your customers, 95 % of the time are really happy, if you enrage someone three times in a row, you lose a customer almost for life. And so that's another bad. And they're not looking at the long-term consequences of doing what they've done. they're simply looking at the short-term cost savings and that's the real way to kill any brand which is to focus so narrowly on short-term financial expediency that you forget the fact that you're in a relationship so that that will be a case where for example um uh you know a restaurant business nobody expects you know uh you know a personal welcome in a motorway service station there are places like mcdonald's which are relatively impersonal okay but failing to recognize people and just failing to recognize the nature of a relationship so that each transaction basically starts from scratch that's one really big failing i think you can i mean the other one is is you know simply by um uh anything you do that diminishes the i'll go back to the scarf model okay there's this great model neuroscientist david rock and the model of human things that humans care about that aren't really quantified and aren't well understood by economists it's it's scarf which stands for status certainty autonomy relatedness fairness and okay and people care about those things with to the depth of their being if you do something in a restaurant which is an affront to someone's status effectively that will that will arouse far more ire and likelihood of a boycott uh than uh having slightly bad food what are the other ones status certainty so what do you mean by that that's kind of like predictability a good example of certainty would be um signs on the tube platform which say next tube seven minutes okay uh in restaurants response we'd rather we'd rather i mean okay if if we're at an airport and it says flight delayed 47 minutes we're going here flight's delayed 47 minutes i'll go and find a go and have a drink or i'll go to the lounge or whatever okay if it just says delayed we're in a state of uncertainty yes and we find that inordinately more painful yes then we we've you know so quite often you can manage a downside in advance i mean there's a huge difference if you think about it between being handed a menu and being told that the hake's off okay off the menu and then or versus ordering hake and then 10 minutes later they come back and say the hake's off the menu oh my god i listen to i listen to a podcast with a mission star chef and one of they go through their food icks and that's that's one of the icks in terms of managing expectations it's totally fine if you hand someone a menu and say i'm terribly sorry yeah but why but for some reason apparently in loads of restaurants they uh they say that they the staff know from day dot that there's no fucking hake right but they still go around the tables and say order the person orders the expectation becomes here yeah and then suddenly you'll go go to the kitchen come back i mean the brilliant book you must have read the book by will gadara so i tried to get him on the podcast actually and in terms of hospitality because i asked that that brilliant observation that the things you deliver that the person wasn't expecting yeah that you have in a sense the mind of a game theorist with the customer not the mind of a you know of a kind of uh of a rule follower what do you mean by what you mean by the game theorists i loved the way in which he went to you know one of the best restaurants in the world and said okay all of this was as you'd expect absolutely amazing but where could we do better than them we can't do better than them when the food because their food is already top notch but he said when i ordered coffee at the end of the meal it was just bog standard coffee and he went and appointed one of his staff as kind of like the coffee sommelier basically yeah you know and and you know got into some massive you know pavoni cappuccino machine he also appointed i think one of the waiters as their beer guy because he said that all these restaurants wank on about wine endlessly yeah but 20 of people prefer beer yeah we were talking about this last time so he there were these sort of craft breweries who are literally so delighted they were more or less sending them a free beer i think because they were so delighted that a that a leading new york restaurant had finally decided to take beer seriously but also i like about that book he says he talks about the story i'd much rather have a conversation with a beer sommelier than the wine sommelier because wine conversations are kind of wanky aren't they with beer conversations that's like the the status game in like all its tom foolery isn't it you've ever had um joe fattery he's coming on he's coming on brilliant okay so i will give a i will give a pre-plug here for someone i consider one of the greatest exponents of uh particularly of drink and behavioral science in that he's utterly brilliant in his knowledge of both and so he's fascinating on either topic but when the two topics overlap it's absolutely pure magic yeah well he's because i think he lives in stockholm now so he was yeah you're right yeah he did something like that i need in fact i'm going to message him after this so he's coming on but the other thing i like about what Will does is he talks about the story of the remembering something about how like a significant fact and he realises the story of the couple who've been in New York and they're in these this Union Square and then he brings out, someone goes around the back and brings around one of those shitty hot dogs from the hot dog stand, goes to them and says oh here's a hot dog but they put it on like a nice plate it doesn't make sense, it's like a juxtaposition of a shitty hot dog for a burger stand with sweaty onions on a meatless and style plate but at that moment of magic you can't create again in terms back to the self-checkout thing and the and sort of the perversity of it do you know booths retailer up north yeah in total bit like the coffee thing of like hey where what are our competitors what's the achilles heel in our competitors or like where are they what's their strength that could be their weakness so booths i think like back in last year got rid of got rid of all self checkouts and i interesting they're only 30 they're about 20 stores all up north they make their own um food because i've got a vague memory that they sell to amazon fresh is that right that i think you get booths kind of what yeah you know they've got their own they've got their own brand of certain why why what uh sorry one more fun let we'll go back to the we just go back to the scarf thing so yeah so we've done we've done status consistency autonomy now an example of that would be people prefer a table they've chosen to a table that's imposed on them even if it's the same table okay so one nice thing a restaurant can do is say where would you rather sit or you can have any of these three tables people are just happier with that not because necessarily they get to choose the table well sorry not because they wouldn't have chosen the table you wouldn't would have allocated them anyway but simply because the act of making the choice make you like something you've chosen more than something you that's imposed on you yeah okay even if it's the same thing okay it's why we used to work with a ford and ford always had lower customer satisfaction figures than a few competitors and we had to explain that and they got annoyed because they couldn't get this satisfaction figure above a certain amount even though they'd made the cars better and better and better and we had to explain it's because so many of your customers are fleet customers they haven't chosen a ford they've been told they're driving a ford and it's not the same even if you would have chosen a ford you won't like a car as much if your employer tells you that's the car you've got to drive versus if you've chosen that car um uh that's autonomy people people don't like being railroaded or tram railed um relatedness you could actually a better phrase might be reciprocality or relationship which is people don't like a series of standalone transactions they like an acknowledgement of their past custom um you know and so treating regular customers differentially better than you treat in treat treat treat people who are just in off the street and you know at scale that's a loyalty program perhaps but in an in an independent restaurant simple recognition simple as that and then fairness is fairness uh you know well okay what really pisses people off is that those people got their food first but they ordered after we did those kind of things really really upset people yes now it might be that the thing you've ordered is a completely different thing but again you can overcome that by pre-warning people in advance perhaps one thing i want to ask you about is uh the rick rubin podcast yeah because i think we we were here you were here like the day before you flew out to do that podcast in Italy I thought it was amazing it was actually five hours edited down to about three and a half yeah the conversation went on for ages yeah yeah he's I mean I think absolutely brilliant what so few things on that I suppose the first thing is um is yeah well he's got a quote which I just I I love I think it's so applicable to marketing is is the audience comes last and this is so applicable in music right so So in music, the audience comes last.

2:08:07It's like, if David Bowie or John Lennon had done market research and put the audience first, you wouldn't have Ziggy Stardust. You'd have Skiffleband. Yeah, yeah. And I think when the audience comes first, the prime example of this, and this is why it's shite, is the X Factor. Other than maybe, that's when it's all like decision by committee, isn't it really? Like it's voting. that's interesting because you you get two weirdly opposite things you get the curse of averaging yes but you also sometimes also get i mean which you know let's face it the beatles were beneficiaries of this you also get kind of collective insanity as well and the beatles undoubtedly but you also get those weird effects where people are hugely influenced by everybody else around them and you get the sort of fashionable effect um but the idea that more people collectively make better decisions is both true and wrong it's complicated so how you design decision making is a and what we know one of the interesting things about the dynamics of decisions i always jokingly say unless you're by the sea never open a fish restaurant yes because there's always somebody there who doesn't want to eat fish okay and uh you know you have the that's a thing called minority rule where if everybody else is pretty indifferent but one person will only do b and won't do a everybody ends up doing b it's like why everything's kosher certified that's why all soft drinks are kosher yeah are effectively kosher because it's not worth coke maintaining a separate supply chain for kosher coke so they i don't know what the mechanism so So because the quote that's, or not the quote, it's just something I think about a lot, which is the famous David Ogilvie quote, which is, there's no statues of committees.

2:09:56Yeah. Which is almost like the audience comes last. I mean, if you're using a committee to bring out possible problems, if you're exploiting a good book by Matthew Syed on this called Rebel Ideas, if you're looking for dissenting opinion, if you're looking for diversity of opinion, and you're acknowledging that in your decision making process, then a group of people can be now David Ogilvie, for example, before he sent out any body copy for approval, would show it sort of 12 different people for their suggestions. so it isn't the idea that one person on their own without without a sounding board is necessarily perfect and you shouldn't be influenced at all by the opinions of others but at the same time average opinion for example it's bad it can often be very very bad you end up appealing to nobody because nobody's really that average you know yeah so that's exactly because i i think uh in your book and i uh it's like innovation happens at extremes so it's like you as you say it's the edges it's the edges yeah the edges sorry is is no it's it's absolutely true is is is kind of the the anethesis of that is the x x factor which is other of the outliers as harry stars etc but the bulk of it is is this kind of move to the middle move to average move to kind of committee-based decisions when in terms of food i'm just trying to think of examples of like how uh like new ideas can bubble up or how people can go about thinking about creating new brands so for example of an example of where the audience comes last could be kombucha kombucha kombucha is an example or or indeed or indeed of course the original mcdonald's because it had an incredibly limited menu it was effectively an imposition on the because the thing that it was replacing was american diner culture where you had a huge menu with eggs over easy everything was customized okay and mcdonald's effectively took the bet that people would actually sacrifice choice for speed and so they had a system which allowed you to prepare the food in advance of it being requested that's crazy and so when you think about it nothing seems remotely subversive about mcdonald's now obviously because it's established it well actually i mean the kfc predates mcdonald's it's not the original burger king i think no hold on the whopper is older than the big mac but i think mcdonald's might be older than burger king if i'm right but but um but but at when when it first started mcdonald's was a deeply subversive it was almost an example of beginner's mind that these people get his mind that's a phrase in the rick rubin podcast it's a buddhist concept that sometimes you get remarkable innovation from people who are new to a field and their ignorance is actually a strength not a weakness yes because they don't think to automatically do things the way that everybody else did them yes you know there were certain practices in uh restaurant management which were deeply enshrined and of course mcdonald's broke most of those rules you know that you must be able to ask for your eggs to be made they're made on demand that you know and mcdonald's by effectively shrinking down the menu massively to about five items i think originally went completely in the opposite direction yeah so the whole the opposite of good idea is a good idea exactly that yeah yeah the so so with the rick rubin podcast what did you the kombucha is an interesting idea and i have to confess that someone came to me about 10 years ago i thought there was a potential market for this fermented tea drink which was popular in i can't remember where it is mongolia or something it's china it's china yeah i remember thinking yeah good luck with that one well it's crazy but that's a great example of like where where the audience comes last and i'm trying to think almost so the other one would be little moons you know the by the way i don't really understand those yeah well so what's the appeal i don't get it i buy them but and you know my kids seem to like them but i don't really get the i don't really get the whole thing what's it about but that's like bubble tea i can't decide whether bubble tea is a valuable addition to my beverage repertoire or a load of old bollocks i really i've never had bubble tea that's never really it's worth a try it's i mean uh in hot weather i mean particularly i mean i can see the value of it and actually having a kind of stimulant drink which is cold and but it's quite it's quite interesting the thing i find weird is uh kimchi oh i like that yeah i love it but like the actual the thought of like but then think about this i mean you know i think quite a lot of food is the beneficiary of associations rather than the food itself i've always thought about sushi okay it comes from japan we know japan has very sophisticated and eccentric food culture and yet if sushi didn't exist and you're watching tv and you're told that these poor people who are refugees in some african country were reduced to such poverty they're reduced to eating raw fish wrapped in rice with a bit of leaf around it you wouldn't go what an exciting culinary opportunity you go poor sods i hope that never happens to me yes and so you know i don't know what the other one that always baffles me is that that soup thing with a leaf in it that you get in japanese restaurants miso soup you know if someone if heinz brought that out everybody go what the hell are they thinking the stupid leaf in the thing it doesn't really taste of anything there are a few white lumps in the bottom because it's japanese what i don't wear on that different rules apply on that association thing is when i was traveling because i met a lot of people who found the concept of an english breakfast utterly repugnant so these people they were canadians uh canadians have a kind of english that's what i was basically saying but Canadian bacon is not bacon.

2:15:47It's a lie. It is not bacon. It's taken from a completely different part of the pig, and it doesn't deserve to be called bacon. They're like, you guys have beans on your breakfast? Oh, that beans thing is uniquely, it's very, very weirdly, the whole baked bean thing is a weird British outlier. Really? So the beans thing would strike them as completely bizarre. And, of course, there are full English breakfast purists in the UK who regard the beans as an aberration. You shouldn't have them. my view is if they're in a separate pot it's acceptable and then you can you can merge them with the whole if you want to but you shouldn't just put beans on a full english breakfast that's adjacent to the other items that's an interesting thing back on the food hips but then i went to spain and they have donuts for breakfast and that struck me as the most repulsive thing i've ever seen because the idea of having something sweet for breakfast just doesn't in the british mindset doesn't feature at all does it i mean that's weird yeah that's what pep tarts might have made a little bit of progress but other than that i can't think of you know generally we want our breakfast to be savory yeah the the but what i don't understand but a lot of these hips is almost like a weird status play here is like if you go to a posh have a posh full english with with the tin and the beans in the little uh ramekin ramekin yeah like that's suddenly not cool it's like you've got to go to the there's a whole thing now on on social media which is like going around to the best um uh kind of greasy spooner like that you see i'm glad we've discovered that because you know there's nels just off the a2 not far from gravesend uh m2 my nels it's a brilliant transport cafe and and it just in you know it's just just off the motorway in kent uh really really i'm really glad that the really good breakfast uh the british breakfast food has had a well-deserved renaissance because you know i can't think about i mean george bernard shaw someone who said it's very easy to eat well in the uk you just have breakfast three times a day um and of course the two meals at which the british really excelled were breakfast and tea lunch and dinner we've got to you know we've got to you know effectively admit surrender to other cuisines not for everything pies for example i mean that's a extraordinary the brit the french for a pie is un p they haven't got their own word for pie and so you know the fully enclosed pie that's a miraculous so i interviewed a guy who um the uh who had a pie restaurant in london at the rosewood did you ever go the pie room i heard about it i never went there fascinating guy so he he taught me talked to me all about the history of pies yeah and he was saying pies were back in the day like like like now we've got chicken shops they were everywhere yeah they were absolutely everywhere how you know pie and mash you would have had gravy yeah yeah like the eels and shit like that yeah what how would if you were to be if i was to say to you right rory you've got i'm gonna you've got to kind of give pie and mash shops i'm talking about the east end ones like a renaissance and like put them on on the same because they're dying how does they how do they come i think that would succeed if you just gave it a twist yeah but that's what i'm trying to work i don't know what the twist is offhand but I think you could actually, you could revive that quite easily because, again, it's rather like my bacon sandwich idea.

2:19:10If you just focus on one thing, people assume that if you only do one thing, you're going to do it pretty well, okay? You know, and therefore, if you create the brand world of pies, as it were, I think there are many, many places where that could succeed. Yeah. I need to think about the margin. You have to do something really weird with the pricing, like the pie costs 15 quid or maybe not that much, but the pie costs a lot of money, but then the mash is free. You do a whole lot of weird things with that. You do weird things with the pricing. You could almost create a weird story around the fucking crust.

2:19:49Yeah, yeah. It's a bit like how... I always joke about this, that the British have very good food, but it all has to be portable. So we invented the sandwich, we invented the pie, we invented the pasty. if you want your food to be portable there's nothing to touch this country you know everything and of course the cornish pasty was a mining device that you took it because you had to eat it with your hands and it had to you had to take it down the mine the sandwich was the other sandwich it was gambling yeah absolutely gambling and he wanted something quick to eat um one so yeah i loved it because there was a sandwich a mcdonald's has just opened outside sandwich in a kind of gas station complex and they put up a big poster saying you know uh hello sandwich welcome to your new restaurant i thought there's a beautiful circularity to this which is the town which gave rise to the earl which gave rise to the concept of the sandwich which effectively get you know essentially gave rise to the burger and then finally mcdonald's comes back to sandwich it's like you know is the burger life going full circle is a burger from germany hamburger uh god god um the frankfurter is definitely german in fact they have a to be honest a slightly unhealthy affection for those slightly weird pork sausages don't they they're fucking rank well i wouldn't know they there's a thing called curry verse in germany which if you get it done well can be okay um who was it who wrote that absolutely scathing review of the german donna kebab um that was um was it charles corinth charles corinth yeah i read that and the one thing i entirely agree with him about is the fucking kebab is a lamb-based meal right because the germans don't seem to eat lamb at all i don't know why lamb consumption is really weird okay because americans don't eat lamb at all really no obviously new zealanders and australians unsurprisingly eat a lot of lamb and i was at this quite sophisticated dinner with you know the odd nobel prize winner kicking around and the host was lebanese and so one of the things they served were effectively lebanese skewered kebabs of lamb absolutely fantastic yeah and these americans i mean these were seriously like professors at ivy league universities going i'm like eating a sheep here like i'm you know i'm actually consuming sheep i think what the fuck are these people dropping whales right yeah yeah it's a staple meat but the the donor kebab should be a fucking lamb you know should be a lamb based thing right what the german donut kebab apparently is beef or chicken what the fuck's going on there yeah that is crazy so i went to berlin once and the kebabs there are extraordinary the the because they have in like a focaccia uh bread which is just out of this world um they've got a very clever gimmick the gdk which is the um waffle bread which is a clever gimmick yes but giles corin absolutely hated it didn't he hated it yeah yeah he he has those those ways one thing so with your book and I'm this is more for like kind of our listeners who analyze data to make decisions before I do anything else I just need to check the timing I'm sure she said six oh it's just in case I'm pretty yes Anna texted me say it was six and you're right it's six okay I'm relaxed yeah we'll probably wrap up about well if you want actually just so whilst I wrap up I can you can go into that everyone will be gone now by now okay okay i'll be the super i'll be fine whatever um so the uh yeah so so i've obviously read your book is absolutely amazing and i know let me tell you why i find food so interesting okay it's because comedy tends to be very good because there's very rapid feedback okay you learn very quickly whether you're funny or not and that's because of laughter okay if people aren't laughing or worse still are throwing things at you you know very quickly you fail now imagine how difficult it is let's say to hone a comedic set in an imagine with an imaginary audience which is has is very very slow very poor sense of humor so they last five minutes after you tell a joke much more difficult to become good at comedy is you get slow feedback versus if you get fast feedback now what's so interesting about the restaurant the qsr category the food category is it's a fast feedback category you learn very quickly whether you've got something right not not immediately it's not like comedy but you learn very quickly whether you've got something right or whether you've got something wrong and i think this is why i think will gadara's book is so important because i think he's learned lessons in the restaurant industry much faster than he would have done if he'd been in the banking industry for example you know if you want to know what keeps your well most people stay with their bank for 15 years so when you do some customer service innovation in banking it's literally kind of seven years before you really know whether it works or not whereas the restaurant industry learns for its failures very very fast and so as a result in kind of darwinian terms i think it's really really interesting because it's an industry by the way you know bear in mind that on the site of most successful restaurants five previous restaurants have failed so it's a very very darwinian world but what i think you could do if you're a bank is look at what the best restaurants do and copy it because one thing i loved on your chris williamson podcast is when you talked about how comedians are essentially um evolutionists or like uh what did you say that effectively you you uh there are very few bad comedians there are comedians i don't like yeah yeah they're obviously not bad comedians because they're filming they're filling stadia okay yeah there are comedians i don't find funny at all i won't name them but i mean uh um but nevertheless okay uh you know very quickly whether you know generally um you you can practice and perfect and hone your comedic routine because you know when it's working and when it isn't yeah but didn't sort of you said it's a very darwinian thing in the sense that you know the bad comedians either change what they're doing completely or they get out yes there's a link to evolution with that yeah what what would you say is the link to evolution and food because another example of this we can almost say vegan meat is like a weird spasm you are contending with really weird changing fashions if you think about it i mean when i first ate sushi bear in mind it would have been about 1990 1991 i found the whole concept you know repellent okay and now it's a mainstream food which you know the sainsbury's in seven oaks has its own sushi bar for example um uh you you have extraordinary changing fashions it's it's effectively an accelerated microcosm of the marketplace from which you can learn more precisely because change happens so quickly and because people respond so quickly but also i i just find it you know the whole um invention of things like gusto for example fascinate me you know yes because gusto really really intrigues me because as i said when i first learned to the concept it didn't really make any sense to me i go well why would you do that when you can just you get a cookbook get a recipe order the ingredients make the food what's gusto doing that actually adds to that well logically nothing but it turns out that when the food arrives in exactly the ingredients arrive in exactly the same ratio you do end up making it and you do end up enjoying it a lot more than you would have done an equivalent ready meal for less money probably um uh with you know undoubtedly you know uh better taste the on the individualistic level i think and I'm interviewing Seth Godin.

2:27:23Have you ever met Seth Godin? No, I've never met him. I'm quite a big fan. I mean, actually, his book, Purple Cow, years ago. It's so good, yeah. Was probably one of the sort of two or three books which kind of flipped my brain, you know, back in the, this would have been the late 90s, I guess. Yeah, so interviewing him next week after next. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, which I'm really looking forward to. But he's obsessed with cooking, and he says there's a lot of parallels between cooking and marketing, and I think or alchemy I mean there's literally alchemy in fucking cooking yeah you'll get your I believe I believe a bowl of ramen is a good um analogy for good or bad organizations so you can be rubbish can't it well no but essentially you have you have the egg you have all the you have all the moving parts which is the egg the uh do you want to check that no no I don't know what i think that might have been the tv actually you you have the the egg the the pork the noodles the veg individually they're okay the culture the culture i believe the culture of an organization is is the broth you pour the broth on that fucker and everything comes together and those parts start moving yeah and i think it's orchestrated it's orchestrated so i think the broth is the analogy of what culture is you can take these dear things no broth nothing works broth culture works culture is almost like the broth that brings that's a brilliant analogy you're absolutely right which is it enables what a culture does it enables people who are themselves of themselves not necessarily that remarkable and in some respects very different yes to come together in a cohesive whole yeah like because if you don't have the egg the egg i think the squidgy egg is i would if you gave me imagine i was to give you a squidgy egg which has been dunked in tea like what the fuck is that suddenly you put it with with the broth and it just all works and there's a korean thing dulciet bibimbap which is the the rice in the hot bowl and that's an interesting thing because it arrives looking immaculate and then you mess it all up with your chopsticks and add and and the chili sauce is actually the unifying force there yes yes which is absolutely a remarkable thing but what what's um what's what seth talks about is how um cooking on the most when you're cooking for yourself is this kind of this is you you approach this problem which is i need to cook a meal and you get that really fast feedback we're talking about which is i've got x in the cupboard yeah um i need to put this together does it work yes or no how can it be improved and it's that in terms of evolution my original point which is start where you are use what you have do what you can yes yeah but evolution you're like okay i put too much chili sauce in that yeah uh fajita for example next time i'll do less so is that rapid rapid rapid feedback um but i think yeah the cooking cooking and food i mean that's why i'm endlessly fascinated it's very interesting to look at the origins of things i love the fact that there is actually he's dead now but there was actually a guy called nacho um after whom nachos are named so the guy was called i think nacho is the spanish short form of ignatio and he was called ignatio he ran some thing just south of the texas border in mexico some women i think might have been military wives came in who crossed the border for the day and they were hungry but he'd run out of ingredients and he got some basically he got some corn bread and then cooked it to a crispiness covered it with cheese and whatever he had left over and he was actually the original so nachos are called nachos because of a guy called nacho okay right somewhere south of i think there's a place called eagle pass texas and just south of the mexican border i think i've got this right there's this guy called ignatio um nacho always known as nacho who effectively is the absolute godfather of that and it came out of necessity as well it came out of him not having enough food left over at the end of the day but these people wanting something to eat so effectively milts cheese and a few other things over these chips is yes i love the stories in food as well so one thing seth godin has and know we we've talked about kind of evolution um and and and food and marketing seth had a background in kind of philosophy what how would you say and he he's got a quote which i'm actually i'm going to ask him he says marketing is humanity humanity is marketing i was like i don't know what he means that's a big claim yeah yeah yeah no but emphatically what you have to be preoccupied with as a marketer is the human dimension and you have to be disproportionately obsessed with it because those human factors whether they're psychological perceptual whatever tend to get averaged out or lost in the process of running a larger and larger business now i always think you know if you if you grow up in a restaurant or a shop or a cafe it's like a free mba right because you understand all the components of a business.

2:32:29You understand, you know, supply, logistics. You understand pricing. You understand margins. But you also understand the human factor. You can't afford to run a shop or a cafe. You know, that's why Margaret, it's only a coincidence that Rishi Sunak and Margaret Thatcher both grew up in shops. And because it gives you an understanding of how a complex system works in its entirety. now what tends to happen is you get people who just go to school go to university and then they get a job in finance or procurement or whatever they understand the part that they're trying to optimize but they don't understand how to optimize the whole so so back to the honest but if you're running a cafe you realize that it doesn't matter how good the food is if you treat a consumer i think the example i always give jokingly is you know if you go out for the best meal of your life but one of the the prongs on your fork is misaligned it'll ruin the meal 100 in the same way if you go out for a meal that's fantastic but something's wrong about the i mean this is what bothers me about gales actually there's something wrong with the queuing system and i actually think that for the money you pay for a coffee in gales they should fucking well bring it to the table right rather than making you stand around like a dick waiting for someone to make your coffee they should say okay go and sit down i'll bring you the coffee because you're then holding up the queue which makes the queue longer and longer is this a deliberate attempt to lengthen the queue so it creates social proof of demand we don't know but there's something there about the queuing system of gales that really riles you could reverse engineer the success of gales what is going i know lockdown you know lockdown in terms of things kicking off and lockdown is sticking around sourdough baking was it was a huge trend that i think yeah that's one thing i definitely that's part of it but to have that scale and you know the chocolate i sent you yeah that is the mocha so that if you get hot chocolate from gales they're using islands they use yeah so i mean i'm so they're like i don't work directly with them but like they they they're great but but what i don't understand because you never see something that that prolific and that premium part of it is that we're changing the way we shop in general.

2:34:42So people tend to, I mean, it's worth noting, okay, that bakeries, particularly if you go up north, or Gregg's is a bakery, right? But if you go to most ordinary towns where they're ordinary people, there's a bakery with a massive great queue out the side. Okay? It's not like the concept, what they did was they took that and made it posh. actually you know the i mean if you only got to go to any ordinary town london doesn't really have much of a bakery culture but you know and actually those bakeries have probably died in the towns where gales is now successful but there used to be a bakery which sold cakes generally very sweet cakes often very pink covered in icing you know all that sort of stuff but it's a popular food but you know that's not a you know there was there were ample proof points that people like that kind of food and if you look to be honest there's an awful lot of trends in food it's doing basic food really really well yeah i think it's doing so you know it's doing a because and doing one thing yeah and that's the other trend is yes or two things i love the australian um uh business but there's a serial entrepreneur who creates these restaurant businesses in sydney and the latest one is wings and tins and you just have sell two things you You sell wings and you sell tinnies.

2:36:03So you have really interesting beers, lots of variants of chicken wings. That's it. Wings and tings. There's a thing of wings. There's wings and tings. Wings and tings in Brixton. But yeah, they're two separate things. Back to the Rick Rubin thing, just because I find him, I think his book, The Creative Act, The Creative Way, whatever it is, I think it's absolutely genius. I think it's like a… A Way of Being, The Creative Act, A Way of Being is the full title. Yeah, and I think I actually interviewed a chef called Thomas Straker, who's got a restaurant, and he kind of touched upon Rick Rubin. We kind of inadvertently went there, but I was saying, what's your approach to creativity?

2:36:45So I read the book, and Rick talks a lot about music producers, and Tom was saying what you're doing is the being part is taking in every single restaurant you've ever eaten as a chef. Interesting. Everything you've, he's from Hereford, which is on the Welsh border. Yeah, it is, yeah. Taking in all of that and all those things pulled in together and then put on the plate, that's originality. It's all your unique things. Yeah, actually a lot of it is theft, by which I mean, you take things and repurpose them. Yes, yes. The idea of complete originality is probably, you know, that most as i said it gets back to the adjacent possible yeah an awful lot of what what what works is taking what works of something else and then repurposing it recontextualizing it reframing it and you know the great thing with chefs is there you know one of the reasons why i think food has become much more interesting is that chefs have become more honest in that they are influenced by the food they themselves eat yeah they become a little more selfish do you remember who was the michelin starred chef who who said that he thought the best pizza was marcus wearing i'm interviewing his his head chef uh two weeks yeah i mean i find the parallels between marketing and cooking and and the creativity i think that sweet spot is something that fascinates me and also that business of setting the expectation is really interesting the whole business of how you design a restaurant you don't necessarily advertise not in the early days but the restaurant creates through everything from typography to furniture to everything else it creates an expectation which then has a huge influence i think on how on what you experience and also uh what will guardia says or guardia is uh service is black and white hospitality is color That was weirdly someone who applied for a job, wasn't it?

2:38:47What's the difference between service and hospitality? And the idea is that service can be reduced to an algorithm. It can be reduced to component parts. Yes. You see, whereas hospitality is colour. It's effectively a very different thing. It's a beautiful answer to the question, isn't it? Yeah. But what do you think he means by that second part? I get the service because the service is repeatable. It's consistency. Well, it's the bit you're trying to repeat, the bit you can kind of measure, the bit where you know whether you've got it right or you've got it wrong. You know, it's in the realm of kind of have we met these certain criteria?

2:39:22Yeah. And then hospitality is, well, there's a Japanese concept called Kano theory by a guy who's at the University of Tokyo who argued he did a lot of work in the Japanese consumer electronics field back in the day. and he argued that products and you could apply this to services as well had three attributes and they're they're very different okay there's table stakes you have to not fail at anything markedly okay so that would be if you bought milk repeatedly and every time you bought this brand of milk the carton leaked right you wouldn't buy it again doesn't matter anything else you've done it's a waste of time because the carton leaks okay yeah and that's what's called i think sort you could call it table stakes or basic attributes.

2:40:09They're what's required to be in the category in the first place. Then there are performance attributes, which are how good are you at doing the thing that the thing is intended to do, how good the milk is within the thing, whether people can tell that it's good milk, you know, whether it, you know, it has reasonable shelf life, all those things. And generally, yeah, there's a linear return on improvement there. And then there's a third component of things which would be delight attributes where they're things you weren't even expecting and as a consequence of not expecting them you really notice them and they create a kind of emotional effect which is out of all proportion to their cost but they're often quite tangential to the main function of the product so the example i always give is if if you're in consumer electronics you have a cassette player and obviously it has to play cassettes and it has to work and it mustn't mangle the tapes it mustn't catch fire it mustn't do any of those terrible things which would basically be you exit the gene pool at that point okay and then you have the performance attributes of the cassette deck of things like battery life and sound quality and you know wattage to the speakers before they start distorting those are the basic performance attributes and then the delight attribute in a cassette deck was the eject mechanism so if you you you won't remember cassettes but you remember dvds do you no i know exactly what you're talking about which is you press eject and it goes it has like a counterbalance damping mechanism and it hisses in a beautiful hydraulic way you oh that's lovely i'd really like that nice action as alan partridge once said on the other hand if you press eject it just goes clack functionally there's no difference between the two okay there's no reason to spend money on the eject mechanism but precisely because you can make it lovely and people aren't expecting it that's where you should spend your money now will gadara's point was i think about the spoons he chose for the ice cream in the central courtyard of a museum he found these italian spoons everybody went crazy because they were plastic but they were particularly lovely and they cost a fortune everyone's saying do we need to spend x cents per spoon but as he pointed out he said when everybody finished they couldn't help going on about the spoons that was the thing they noticed because it was an area of disproportionate that's why it's called hospitality beyond reason yes you there's a certain amount to it which is service which you can codify and reduce to an algorithm and then there's the thing that you weren't expecting and but why why i love and in mcdonald's by the way that probably isn't anything to do with food it's like handing the kids balloons right or it's the toy and a happy meal or whatever it may be yeah i i actually think for my own personal i i when i'm drunk and i go to the service um i always go to the one that one's worth roundabout that expectation that's bizarre that one's worth roundabout it's like a little bit of los angeles has just descended on london i don't understand why you know the the arch is like totemic they're like up like that it is kind of like that cathedral of consumption yeah i'm like i mean when i'm fucked i'm like looking at it going oh my god it's like i feel like i'm like i'm getting pulled into the mothership of gluttony you live in surrey do you so you drive out of that way i used to live in fulham you used to live in fulham yeah and then all my mates live in um sort of batters so i'm always around that part of london so it's like the the perfect uh place to go but what i love the surprise and delight and i don't know if this is intentional or not when the chips are in the bag and there's an o that feels like there's an overflow of chips i don't know five guys are the is the extreme example extra scoop yeah it's the extra scoop but that that does something to you and also like i think the surprise and delight is the the wonderful selection of sauces you can get i think mcdonald's sauces are the best the barbecue the ketchup of course curry sauce is fantastic the kfc now does it with the extra hot one doesn't it so you've got a choice of those when you have chicken dips yes yeah they've got they've got an extreme one and they've got barbecue and they've you typically get some sort of sort of sweet chili thing don't you yeah yeah yeah but those things are exactly that it's that you you know and actually um you can have a meal that's ruined because they forget to put the sauces in the bag oh well i've had that numerous times it's rather like the most the most failed the most failed attempt to create a low budget own brand version of a product was i think sainsbury's in the 1980s produced their own version of the pot noodle okay which was called something like noodle pot or whatever it was you know and it was the same packaging but there was no sachet and you just opened the lid of this thing and it was just like you've been cheated you know you felt completely bereft yeah because the whole point of the pot noodle is that weird flavor sachet that you put on the top because that creates the yin and the yang of the whole thing is that it's the alchemy i never thought i'd be talking about the the buddhist union of opposites in a pot noodle but um that's the alchemy of the thing if they had if the pot noodle never had that sachet wouldn't have gone anywhere the pot the sachet of the pot noodle is their kind of version of hospitality the other reason i love food is like there's there's there's basically every single every single touch point there's a there's there's a unique story to tell But I think the thing I've seen you, I've listened, is how Guinness turned their bug into a feature.

2:45:32The fact it takes ages to serve and is actually a bit of a, you know. Our staff don't like serving Guinness. Yeah, but the fact it takes longer psychologically, that is, the way you say it turns into a reward, turns into anticipation, to reframe it. Have you been to the Devontree yet? Have you ever heard of the Devontree? Oh, don't. Everybody yesterday was talking about the Devontree, which supposedly does the best Guinness in London. and of course it's the self-fulfilling prophecy because if you sell a lot of guinness it's really really fresh all this stuff about would taste you've never had it until you've had in dublin is kind of contextual bollocks but that's my argument which is why i said you can open a fish restaurant by the sea is because fish tastes better when you're by the sea rosé wine tastes better when you're by the sea don't ask me why but there are a lot of foods which require context to be fully enjoyable oh it's like yeah food you have on holiday and you bring it back it's just no no this is the famous example of someone who who was in the caribbean and bought the rights to a banana liqueur which while they're in the caribbean tasted and perno outside france tastes like shit yeah okay ricard perno you you you drink them outside a french cafe it's fantastic you go buy a litre bottle to take home you won't drink it for five years and the same thing happened with this person who bought the rights to this blonde liqueur they they took it back and invited their friends around to south london with great fanfare saying you won't believe it i bought the rights to this drink i think it's the most magical thing and they all basically said this is disgusting yeah because it doesn't work in london yes you see and that and when i say that when you're by the sea it would make sense if this were an evolutionary adaptation though it might not be okay so i asked the question this is the question i always had as a mock question for business school students why are there more fish restaurants by the sea and what you might call the black and white answer is you know low cost of distribution access to raw materials etc but quite a lot of that stuff's probably come or gone all the way to Billingsgate and come all the way back again right yeah it's not really anything like well you know we've got really wonderful supplies of fish necessarily it's simply that when you're by the sea you feel fish and chips by the sea just tastes a lot better than fish and chips in an in land park yeah that's just how it is it's like it's like imagine having a guinness in a costa coffee cup yeah it's just the same like it's same thing yeah same thing i mean it's interesting they've put a lot of attention into designing that pint glass isn't it the guinness pint glass well and also the have you seen that which i don't know is a load of absolute bollocks oh no no the ultrasonic paw with the guinness yeah what's your take on that have i seen it i've owned one i brought my daughter who's 22 my proudest achievement as a parent nothing to do with their educational attainment is the fact that both my daughters drink beer and they're really into beer because i'm not spending the rest of my life buying the little fuckers rosé right okay and um so i'm really proud of that and one of my daughters actually is a major guinness drinker absolutely loves it yes and i'm so proud of that but i actually bought her a nitro surge for christmas but as in but gg but what so that take i haven't actually it it's in first of all it makes pouring a joy and it someone's reviewed it and said it's as good as a bad pub pint now actually that's not bad actually at home i think that's a bit unkind i think it's better than that because it does recreate the whole tactile experience to within a fairly high degree of fidelity i think the nitro surge i'm a big fan why do you think so guinness have now become the most selling pint i think it was last year the other the other big what happened that what was why why did guinness Maybe they've always wrestled with an interesting problem, which is it's actually the least calorific beer.

2:49:11And yet because of its dense nature, everybody assumes it's the most calorific. Yes. So it may be in part that that message has got through. But you've also got the zero alcohol Guinness, which is really, really interesting. That's delicious. Now, here's a good tip. the can of guinness zero alcohol okay is slightly less than a pint if you go to the royal sink ports golf club or sink ports no one knows how to pronounce it uh in deal and you ask for a pint of non-alcoholic guinness because golf golf if you think about it golf courses most people drive to a golf club so there's a limit to how much you can drink if you don't want to wrap your car around a tree and so they sell quite a lot of the zero alcohol guinness and then what they do is they pour the whole pint of zero alcohol guinness and they say do you want me to top that up from the tap so you get the full head and that i actually told guinness about this because i said that's a really important behavior because first of all zero alcohol guinness is a very very good approximation of the taste of a guinness what it is about zero alcohol beer that it's finally got good in the last few years absolutely fascinating what i find interesting so matt ridley's got this which is um about two ideas having sex you know that have you i love that yeah yeah i want to ask you about he's written the red queen he's written the rational optimist he's written evolutionary ideas yeah uh sorry he's written that said by friend i think he's written um what is it how how innovation works or i think there's two ideas having sex right now um yeah which is the combinatorial genetics yeah but as in the the like profusion or the propulsion or the the increase i should say proliferation proliferation there you go thank you in uh wearable tech whoops yeah it's basically having sex with alcohol-free beer because what's happening is is well basically what's happening is i hadn't connected those two well yeah so so basically so the the fact that people are um are now due to podcasts like chris's like stephen bartlett's wearing wearable tech they are realizing now and they are tracking how much even two beers is completely fucking their sleep so they're now not looking to have to have beers this is really interesting and then and then obviously lucky saint as i've picked that as a brand for example that kind of was the chapel down in terms of opening up the market wasn't it yeah yeah yeah so what they've done is they've so they so these ideas are not meant meaning to have sex with each other but they are right as in and then what i mean by that is then you also have the the the huge reduction in alcohol but i mean gen z doesn't drink much and doesn't have much sex that's the weird things about gen z yes that's another that's another uh kind of ancillary part to this i think but then what lucky saint are doing so okay well so we solve this problem which means you get more sleep by wearing when you track your sleep you have two lucky saints instead of two pints you sleep better you train better right lucky saint have then realized with their marketing is okay let's not try and be um a beer let's let's slide into this lifestyle so they have run clubs so they're they're a beer brand that thinks like no one will ever make a success of alcohol-free wine in my opinion and i always intrinsically think that a lot of people actually prefer beer to wine but pretend to prefer wine for reasons of looking sophisticated or because in a restaurant it's served to you in a big bottle which everybody shares so you might as well tuck in but i've always had this hunch that 30 of the population particularly the male population but not exclusively often end up drinking wine in circumstances where left to their own taste buds they'd be drinking beer and i don't think i think i think it's proven now that you can get people enthusiastic about alcohol-free beers but i'd i'd be i'd be interested to see i'd be surprised to see alcohol-free wine making a success i know a guy who's got a brand i think it could it's more the way you'd work i'd be happy to be proved wrong so i think where it works again is that middle of the road so he's actually called it wednesday domain which is you want so he basically says on wednesday yeah you want to crack open a bottle of wine got it but you're you're so he's owning that one day over the week.

2:53:34Thursday you'll go out for fucking Yeah, because Thursday's a new Friday. I think it could work there, but that goes back to what we said at the beginning, the middle of the road. There'll be people who may have one or two glasses I was in Soho last Thursday. It was like fucking Hogarth. You know, seriously, it was like total mayhem. Well, I was riding through in a taxi mostly, because I'd met some people at a restaurant there. Where did you go? Manzi's, which was very, very good. It's owned by the people who own the Woolsey. Oh, nice. It was really, really good. I was very impressed, actually.

2:54:03and um and there i had a vegetarian main course interestingly um uh it was kind of nest of things it was kind of vegetables um kind of tempura vegetables with a kind of a really fantastic thing um but um but it was complete like you know i mean it was um you know it was kind of drunken mayhem on a thursday friday i imagine is now quite quiet is it yeah yeah yeah it's the whole working from home thing what are some of your favorites oh yes so there's a back just closing that loop so i i think i think whether they're mental or not i think whether having sex it really does booze really does fuck with your sleep yes yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't wear those those no woots um i go through periods where i don't drink and then when i get absolutely hammered most days it's like i'm quite extreme but that's how i work uh there's an argument that that's actually a better way to be that actually giving your liver a rest in other words also if you have long periods where you don't drink it's much harder to develop a dependency yeah well that's that's the thing so there is an argument that's what we we called it three total we never got it off the ground it was our branding idea which was the idea that people should be three total which is you don't drink for three days in a row every week yeah it's much easier than counting units and also for obvious reasons it's much more practical because well that's basically what i do when i'm drinking when you drink you drink a lot and then yeah yeah i like i like it but i also like periods but i think those two those two those two completely different uh industries are helping each other out um massively what um if you could have like two food ideas to have sex that's quite a weird way of saying or like two weird great question two ideas you've got to be careful because the general idea of fusion runs up against a mental thing called the jack-of-all-trades heuristic, which is if you just do Malaysian food, you're going to do pretty good Malaysian food.

2:55:56If you do, like, Malaysian-Mexican fusion, people tend to assume that you're a not-very-good Mexican restaurant combined with a not-very-good Malaysian restaurant. So you've got to be very careful. But in ideas having sex, okay, in food... Or two opposing things that could help each other out like lucky saint and whoop essentially kind of having an affair maybe not having sex. Yeah, because actually technology, and this is where the adjacent possible comes in, technology is often dependent for its adoption on something else. So I made this point, which I've never heard made before, but I think it's worth making, which is that you couldn't really have had the growth in the railways in Britain in the 1850s if you hadn't had the penny post being invented in 1840.

2:56:45because you can't just turn up at someone's house 70 miles away and say hi i'm here i'm here to stay for three days if you hadn't had the invention of the post so people could actually make arrangements with each other economically then the railways might not have worked now maybe maybe that's bollocks someone will tell me no no we had no but but fundamentally quite often you need one thing to be invented and then adopted for another thing uh to actually come of age you know it's rather like we asked the question why is it the wheeled suit they put wheels on suitcases after they put a man on the moon you know one of them seems comparatively simple the other one is obviously unbelievably complicated engineering endeavor why did nobody think of putting wheels on suitcases before 1975 or whatever well actually it turns out that things like skateboarding led to huge improvements in inline wheel technology which just made the whole thing much much easier to do yeah and obviously the electric car is contingent on battery improvements that were made for mobile phones yeah so there's a lot of ideas having sex uh what would be a really okay one thing i think okay this is a really weird theory okay and it's probably not true but my theory is that elon musk's grand plan is to combine starlink with electric vehicles with solar panels with battery storage okay to enable people to live off the grid and you therefore solve the world's housing crisis because once tesla produces a motorhome the tesla winnebago right you don't need to worry about buying a house in london you can just go and live in one of those and you now you'll need a base now you'll need a big shed somewhere outside the m25 where you keep all your shit right but you can go and buy you know 15 acres of woodland for like 30 or 40 000 pounds not far from a railway station you keep an electric bicycle you charge that thing up with a bit of solar and the occasional trip to the bp pulse charging station right you can run your nespresso machine your oven your microwave your big telly off that 200 kilowatt hour battery that's underneath your tesla winnebago winnebago you've got your starlink thing connecting you to the phone network all he needs to do is produce a sort of microwave toilet that deals with your waste and your effluvium and actually you could tank the world's property market by allowing people to go nomadic that's my weird theory that actually a bit like you remember in goldfinger the guy had that plan which is buy up a lot of gold and then nuke fort knox so all of the world's gold 90 of the world's golds would be radioactive for 70 years so his gold would now become 10 times as valuable that was goldfinger's plan in the film anyway can't remember what the plan was in the book now my my secret dream is that that that elon musk has actually done a massive short on the world's residential and commercial property market okay on the basis that if once once you're on wheels you don't need planning permission so you can buy your little woodland with your little road going in and you can go and park your winnebago there and you can go and live there for a fraction of the cost that you're spending on rent for some shitty bed sit in clapham yes yeah yeah no i think it's it's almost like the extreme version of what we have like so yeah so motorhomes and electric vehicles strike me as really really interesting yes as an idea as having sex because the fully electrified motorhome is a serious, you know, you don't have all that problem with generators and all that shit.

3:00:27Final thing, mate, because I know you've got your... Okay, I'm just trying to think about... No, don't worry, I've got a bit of time. I'm just thinking about ideas having sex. I'm wondering, in a food context, is there something that's fundamentally missing? This is not necessarily missing, but whilst you think, there's a restaurant called... Not Jolene. angelina which i highly recommend going to in dorston which is a fusion that should not work but works fucking charm italian and japanese so you will have they will do a like the most fresh uh it's a restaurant in westroom called bissey's bites which is jamaican italian wow and as she describes it he's italian she his wife is jamaican so what would they have on that that's a wild and actually um she said he's the culinary genius i just added the requisite amount of spice but she's doing herself an injustice because the various patties and things are really fantastic yeah i think it's uh i think the i think where it gets interesting in terms of having sex is is how or what's had sex already is technology and food so self-service is an example where...

3:01:42Okay, there's something missing. Indian food is the greatest food in the history of the world. You know Jim Carlin got two stars now. It's got two stars. Oh, fuck, I won't be able to get in now. But I used to go there. The set lunch was an absolute blinding... I need to get there, yeah. There's something with Indian food in... Now, obviously, at the high end, Dishoom's done it in scaling it. There's something that has to be possible in terms of scaling Indian food didn't they have Bombay Bicycle Club which was the version of that that only got to about three or four outlets didn't it I thought yeah I don't I don't I don't know weirdly I went to something called Bombay Bicycle Club in the United States once but I don't know whether that was a whether they bought the brand or something but do you think do you think like deep deep down psychologically the story and almost that consistency of the promise you know what we're talking about earlier is we're so used to our local curry house a bit like we're I know, I know, I know.

3:02:38Like your local pub, you don't want to become part of a chain. Yeah, whereas that's the genius of Dishoom, but Dishoom, what Dishoom do. I actually love Indian food from the fact that you could be anywhere in Britain, or indeed in Fuerteventura, as I was last week, and have a fantastic Indian meal. I think, you know, the fact that you're only, you know, with a bit of a trip closer or whatever, the fact that you're only eight miles away from somewhere fantastic is just joyous. Yeah, I think. okay so let's abandon that then and say that it's a fundamentally localized artisan food okay i'll keep thinking about this because it's a really interesting question but also are there new technologies so i think the business of uh so i was talking to people at berkeley who are food scientists and they say that actually a lot of the work in preserving food was done by nasa okay in other words space meals and a lot of it's been done by the military which is mre meals ready to eat which is the military category and you can actually have really really good food that's preserved with a really long shelf life um and it tastes delicious the problem you face is the problem you face with frozen food with iceland which is because it's more efficient it's cheaper and therefore people think it's down market i've got an idea that two things that could have sex this is this this can be long preserved very high quality food is a really interesting so that's that's that's um that's person one or idea one idea two and this is this canadian couple i met out in uh in costa rica they actually own one of these stores is why frozen fruit in the uk has such a stigma with it right yes whereas not in france piquet in france which you can also buy on ocado is the french marks and spencers ready meal it's it's a traitor but it's all frozen yes and the french so my french colleagues when i told them they could buy picar food on ocado they practically all hugged me because it's like brits missing marks and spencers okay and so but it's frozen and the french serge la frozen food doesn't have the stigma and it it does in the uk and it's a huge tragedy because in many ways you preserve the nutrients better this is it jamie oliver has badgered on like frozen fruit is better yeah yeah the actual quality is better and it's flash frozen so two ideas i i'm just thinking why is someone the ivy does that thing doesn't it which is the frozen fruit with um white chocolate hot white chocolate sauce pulled over it yes which is one of their sort of staple puddings which is just magically good because it's all the yin and the yang thing going on yes um but no i i'm a big fan of frozen fruit and i think that there's a there are a lot of foods which freeze really really well and i think we've vilified the freezer well iceland's iceland in terms of ice and we've got we've got a chain at the bottom raising well not raising the floor just you've got cook of course which is an interesting chain that's frozen food yeah that's a kent space company again that's more like i'd say that's more like frozen ready meals what i'm the idea i think is almost you have like you walk into like a planet organic and a whole foods so you have the premiumization almost like a frozen trader joe's or a frozen planet organic no food waste probably cheaper for the consumer yeah yeah it's like no problems that absolutely win um i don't know why that's not in the uk but i think we're so we actually work with a company called wrap and one of the things we did was we actually had loaves of bread where the packaging was half eat me freeze me because nobody knows particularly young people don't have a clue one of the things you've got to realize is that and i'll defend the advertising industry and the importance of it in that way is that there's extraordinary widespread ignorance about all kinds of things okay yeah and so i remember someone this is someone with a degree getting really pissed off because someone came and stayed the night with them without asking permission charged their mobile phone off the plug okay now that's like 0.5 p okay right there are a lot of people who don't know that heat uses a lot of electricity and lights doesn't use very much so they'll go around turning off lights absolutely furiously but then they'll leave a three bar electric heater on okay you know or they don't worry about the oven or the kettle or any of that stuff people haven't got a clue about this stuff um and you know you have problems like things like heat pumps where it doesn't seem to make sense that it's five times more efficient to heat a home with a heat pump than it is with a boiler and so you get this and nobody knows what food freezes genuinely you know i mean it's a tragedy that when you buy a freezer there isn't a bloody book in it which says this is the stuff you can freeze and actually it's a you know extraordinary way of minimizing food waste um probably we're also too paranoid because you have this freeze on day of purchase best before nonsense which is actually nobody knows the difference between a best before date and a used by date by the way and they're completely different you know best before date on a can yeah that's one of the one of the things i tried to propose i had a very good friend who said um um you could improve you could reduce food waste what was it a colleague of mine uh by just putting the day of the week on the best on the use by date used by wednesday and people would look at it on friday and go yeah that's okay you know your friend you're that restaurant i don't know the fucking day i don't know what today is it the 6th of march is the 4th 4th month okay right you're gonna have to go no no i'll i've got two more minutes i'll be fine and then you have you have the thing where what it should say is best before it should actually say best before june 24 right because if you say best before june the 24th that suggests a degree of specificity where somehow on june the 25th the thing becomes unedible and will give you botulism but i mean you'd be fine in july fine in august right and so by not giving a margin of error around the best before date people are throwing things out shouldn't be well so you can last longer i don't know why just quickly to on the ideas thing is why more restaurants don't they've got the brand they've got the credentials why they don't freeze like but like i would buy from jim khaner yeah a frozen Jim Carter does its own range of curry sauces.

3:08:54Curry sauces, but I would buy a frozen curry from them. A bit like your... Well, this is the theory that you could do this with meals ready to eat. You could actually have the authentic thing, and they now know how to preserve it. The problem is a marketing problem. It's like Jamie Oliver and the frozen food. It's a marketing problem. It's not a technological problem. And that is often the case. There are lots of things which technology has solved, like Zoom and video conferencing, right? zoom basically solved the technology problem but it took a pandemic to actually create the behavior and so i think with an awful lot of food tech the problem is actually gaining widespread acceptance and adoption it's not actually coming up with the bloody technology frozen food in the uk unlike say france is rarely seen cook being an exception as a premium form of food but it but actually it's probably the best way to preserve really good food thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on LinkedIn, search Dan Pope, and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands.

3:10:21Thank you so much.