Matt Harris: Founder of Thunderbird Chicken

0:00Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishkondorea. What you're about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM. However, the music has been cut due to rights issues.

0:13This is Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal.

0:26Listen in colour. Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world, together with a musician shaping jazz, soul, and blues. My guest today, I'm very pleased to say, is Matt Harris, founder of both Thunderbird Chicken, the fried chicken restaurant, and the Pickle brand Pickle Project. On the cusp of achieving his dream of a professional motorsport career, after success in the UK and Europe led to a scholarship to race NASCAR in the US, Matt's hopes were crushed when the 2008 recession caused his sponsorship to collapse. Travelling the Deep South, following the races, and as Matt says, trying to beg my way behind the wheel, Matt fell in love with barbecue and fried chicken and the culinary craftsmanship that didn't exist in the UK, and he sought to try and recreate it.

1:06Tinkering with recipes using the same scientific mindset he once applied to race cars, Matt launched a street food truck, Barbecue Lab, in London, with his breakthrough Chipuffalo Wings. Make sure I've said that properly, he'll tell me later. Chipuffalo Wings, winning best wings at London Wing Fest, the largest chicken wing festival in the world. Who knew? The success led him to found Thunderbird, now a 15-site fried chicken chain in 2017. And unable to find a decent pickle to go in Thunderbird's burgers, he decided to make his own and indeed launched another business, Pickle Project, with his fiancée, Heidi, in 2024.

1:40You obviously like food. It's very nice to have you here. Are you a foodie? You must be. I am definitely a foodie, yeah. Not just chicken and pickles? Not just chicken and pickles. What is the best meal for you? What does the ideal meal look like for you, Matt? Roast dinner, obviously. Really? Yes. Lamb? Mix. Mix. A beef? Greedy. Greedy. A bit of beef, porchetta. Yeah. A lot. A lot. Very greedy. But I love the fact I haven't met many people that were almost, you know, Formula 3, Porsche, NASCAR, you're almost a racing driver. That's quite exciting. And now you make food. Almost a racing driver, yes.

2:18Well, you were a racing driver. I was. I was almost a successful professional racing driver, but unfortunately the world got in the way of that one. But I'd started out in racing and go-karts as a kid and progressed up from there. So raced in lots of different sort of junior formulae, got as far as F3, ran out of money, went into endurance racing, raced Porsches all over the place. And then all the stars aligned. And I had this opportunity to go out and do a scholarship in the US to race a NASCAR, which is like a dream come true, awesome stuff. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.

2:53Yes. I'm reliably informed. Well, part of the reason for that scholarship was it's sort of very redneck-y, famously oval racing, deep south, you know, throwing beer at each other in the grandstands, that kind of stuff. And at the time, they were looking for a bit less of that kind of Ricky Bobby vibe and were looking for people with accents. And I can really dial up the poshness. That's wonderful. I mean, obviously, you must live in Chiswick. Yes, indeed. And they were looking for people with accents who'd been successful abroad. And like I said, all the stars aligned. So I got on my plane, and as the plane wheels hit the ground, everyone went foreclosure, foreclosure, foreclosure in the deep south.

3:34This is 2008. 2008, and the rug was ripped out from under me. So before you know it, I'm there with a year's visa, but no money. What is it like? I mean, that must have been incredibly heartbreaking, frankly. I mean, I can't imagine what that felt like. But before you go there, because the tears are going to brew. We don't want tears too early. What's it like driving a car really fast? I mean, I am really scared. I'm an unbelievably tentative driver. You know, not tentative, but I know that I'm not brilliant at controlling cars at a fast speed. I've tried a Porsche on a track once, and it was a laugh, but I had someone sitting there, you know, guiding me.

4:13What's the buzz like, if you could describe it in words? Firstly, actually, as a side job, I used to be the guy in the passenger seat, and I can tell you that is terrifying. Yeah, I bet it is. Some idiot who's just bought a new McCann. Yes. And then gets to go for a special treat, theoretically, of course, at Silverstone on the sidetrack. Some guy's screaming, break from the passenger seat, grabbing the steering wheel. Yeah, that was me. But, yeah, I loved it. But just describe, give me a sense. What's the speed thing like for a driver? Why were you so drawn to driving? Initially, it was watching F1 on the sofa with my old man when I was a kid and seeing Nigel Mansell and Senna and Prost and all those legends.

4:55And I got really, really into it. And we did a bit of go-karting and it was successful. And then it sort of developed from there. But when you're in the car, that's what I'm interested in. Well, I just loved the sensation of driving. And I have so many of those photographic memories of watching the car in front of me bouncing over a curb and blasting sparks out from underneath it and flame shooting out the exhaust pipes. You know, you get all these, there's so many sensations. Even there's a track called Brand's Hatch where you go down a really steep hill back up the other side. At the bottom, all the little formula cars would bottom out and they've got a wooden plank underneath.

5:29And, you know, it reeks of sawdust at the bottom of this hill from all the cars burning as they hit the ground. It's so exciting. as so many of the things that I saw and experienced are just unforgettable. You know, the dream is always to go back into it, but unfortunately it is an extremely rich man's spot. Stove me to find out much more about my driving legend. I've just promoted you, Matt Harris. Apart from being almost, well, he was the driver, and he almost would have been famous, I'm sure. He's here with me talking about Thunderbird, and that's a beautiful fried chicken shop restaurant, and also talking about pickles, and that's the Pickle Project.

6:06and making me hear lots more about how he's a bit obsessive about making food taste delicious in the same way he probably was about driving. I wanted to just talk about that disappointment for a moment, though, because I think out of some people's adversity comes opportunity. You must have been in a very low place, joking aside, when it was like your dream is smashed. How does one pick oneself up from that? How did you pick yourself up and then go, do you know what, I love chicken and I'm in the South and I'm enjoying it, you know what, I'm going to start a food business at some point. How does that happen?

6:36I would say not as organically as you might think I mean I so initially I wasn't hit so hard with oh no it's all over I still had this sort of eternal optimism of I'll make it work so I thought you know I'll find some way to get behind the wheel of a car again so I started traveling around the south with my year's visa trying to sort of beg boris steal my way behind the wheel of a car And I did ultimately do eight laps in NASCAR, and it was frigging awesome. But that was it. So eventually that did hit home, and I thought, well, damn, what am I going to do? Came home, got a degree, got a rubbish job in media sales, and passionately hated my life.

7:19But you did it passionately at least. I did, extremely passionately. I mean, you really did. You maxed out on the passion for not liking your life. Indeed. But there's, again, a serious point in there. You knew you weren't doing the right thing for you. No, absolutely. I mean, I had had this sort of North Star that I'd focused on for my whole life of, you know, this incredible career. And then it was gone. But I kept thinking back to what I really loved from the US. And that was the food that I'd encountered over there. So sort of fried chicken, American barbecue. To me, I'd had ribs in TGI Fridays.

7:50I'd had maybe KFC like two, three times. That was it. And then whereas over there when I was traveling, a bit like accents change every 100 miles in the UK. hey, the styles of fried chicken and barbecue change over there, but they're like religious about using a particular kind of wood in their smokers or, you know, it's got to be pork or beef or whatever. I loved all of that stuff and I found it fascinating. So when I came home, while I had this horrible job, I started cooking in the background. And then I very quickly went off the deep end in sort of food science. So using that engineering mindset that I have from racing, where to get the car to go fast, you have to kind of understand how everything works because every nut and bolt is adjustable.

8:28So looking at the car holistically of a little adjustment at the front might make the back of the car handle very differently in a corner. So you apply that to cooking in a really simple sense. You put a steak on a pan. You want the outside nice and brown and crispy and the inside nice and pink and juicy. So how do I make outside crispier, inside juicier? Before you know it, there's flamethrowers and liquid nitrogen and all kinds of stuff in the kitchen. It's just like, what is happening here? It's a garage. It's a garage for food. Yeah, my flatmates are like, what the hell is this? but they ate some delicious meals and some not delicious meals, but that was part of the fun of experimenting.

9:04I just loved it. And around that time, street food was just the coolest thing in the world. It was like late 2013-ish and Twitter was blowing up and I had this idea that maybe street food would be something really fun to do. So one night I got drunk and bought an ambulance on eBay, I think because sober me didn't really have the cojones to do it. Drunk me was just like, why not? So you bought an ambulance. Yes. And that became the barbecue lab. Correct. Yeah, the next morning was a bit of like, what have I done? How do you pick up an ambulance from eBay? Do you have to go and collect the thing?

9:37Yeah. It didn't get driven to you? No. Some guy was using it as a mobile bicycle repair shop, so I mean, it was horrendous. But I got a mate to fill it out with some domestic kitchen cupboards and do a bit of wiring. Off I went and embarked on street food. And ripple dissolve, you win. I love this. that there's something called wing fest and you win the award for the best wings. Yeah. So that sort of science-y recipe stuff that works in my head pervaded through the whole menu. I did a different menu every single day, which is a fabulously stupid idea, I can confirm. It was so hard. But I loved it.

10:16It was all about experimentation and I really got a kick out of sort of breaking down a recipe into its core components, understand how every little bit works and then make them better put it back together. So that was kind of the idea with those wings is take a traditional buffalo wing, break down every single ingredient, try and make it a bit better, put it back together and then Wing Fest was coming up and I thought this might be fun, might make a few hundred quid it's a good day out, doing a bit of street food stuff and then we won it. I was like oh, okay. He's on the podium He's on the podium.

10:48Number one holding it aloft. Indeed, my favourite trophy ever. Apart from it did melt in a fire. The trophy? Yeah. Later in the street food career, a place called Dinaramba burnt down, which was a bit sad. But anyway, so that one is gone. You're listening to Matt Harris talking about trying to eat a trophy. And that's what happens, Matt, when you cook a trophy. That's experimentation gone too far. Stay with me for much more from my guest today. It's Matt Harris, and he's the founder of Thunderbird and the Pickle Project. and he's an experimenter at heart. Right now, though, and he'll be back in a couple of minutes, I said, but right now we're going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms.

11:26Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about starting your very own thing. In this clip, we hear from Tarek Ralph, architect and founder and CEO of Catalog, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work. The Mishcon Innovation Series. inspiration from founders of cutting-edge businesses in association with Jazz Shapers with Mishkon Dereya. I think founding your own business has a lot to do with understanding what you're looking to do in founding a business. Like, why do you do it?

12:02Betting on yourself and acquiring all the skills necessary to build a team, build a product, market it, raise the capital. It can be quite a lot of friction, but it can also be quite a lot of fun. and if you know why you're doing it, it gets a lot easier. I've always been interested in making and building things, which is where I got into architecture, which is where I've been making software. And so large parts of my job don't feel like a job. The parts that, you know, running a company still, there's a million friction points every day. There's friction with customers, there's friction with product, there's friction with all kinds of, you know, unforeseen issues that pop up every now and then.

12:37But when you find joy in the act of building, which is what I do. It just becomes a necessary pain and the side effect. And so knowing why you're building a company, why you want to start a business and what you're looking to get out of it and having clarity around that generally helps quite a bit. The Mishcon Innovation Series in association with Jazz Shapers with Mishcon Derea. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM in partnership with Mishcon Derea. It's business, but it's personal. You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, and you can hear this very program again now in the 14th year on the 14th day of the month.

13:17Happy Valentine's Day if you're celebrating. I hope you are. If you pop Jazz Shapers into your favorite podcast platform, my guest today is Matt Harris, founder of both Thunderbird Chicken, the fried chicken restaurant and the pickle brand Pickle Project. So you talk about experimentation, which I love. Is it true that a driver and now a restaurateur and a maker of different sorts of food might be slightly obsessive? Yes. It's okay. It's a good label. But in that, there's a really interesting thing, because I imagine the answer to that question would be yes. In German, the word for search and the word for obsession is actually the same thing, which I kind of thought was interesting.

13:59It feels very appropriate. Is there a buzz in the search for the ideal, the perfect ingredients and the perfect spices that you use? Is there something in that which is similar to you perfecting the way that you got the car to drive and the way that you actually drove it? Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. I find it fascinating understanding how things work. And then it's only really when you understand how they work that you can then make them better. Have you always been like that since you were a kid? No, I think that probably developed from the motor racing. and it was probably towards the latter years of that career where sometimes I'd find a bit of a, there was a bit of a gulf between what I was trying to say to the engineers and what they were hearing and what they could then apply.

14:44So I ended up trying to get them to explain a shock absorber does X, Y, and Z and we can adjust it this way and blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, oh, right, okay, well, we need to do that. And then suddenly it starts working and then you can apply that into just about anything you do. And were people explaining the whole cooking process to you or have you learnt this on your own? No, no. Books, internet, experimentation, messing around, having fun, learning stuff. Just make it up as you go along. And now we're eight years into Thunderbird Chicken. You're in 16, 15. I've just given you an extra one.

15:21Well done. Thank you. We just opened it together. What should we do? I'm on 50-50. That'd be great. 15 different sites. I think a number of them are within the Park Dean resorts, the Park Dean park places. What's it like now? You've got this machine. It's a thing. Are you clear about all the moving pieces? Do you know how all of them work? Are there things that you continue to manipulate, as it were, to improve? Yes. As a founder, you're kind of doing everything initially. You know, for the Pickles, for example, today I'm finance director, tomorrow I'm the plumber, everything. so we now have a very good team with Thunderbird which means I'm a little bit more self-luster requirements so we've got a great finance director, marketing director all these people who look after everything so from an operational day-to-day perspective the business is in really, really good hands the challenge that we're facing as a business though is that there has been a big American invasion so when I started this back in 2017 we didn't have Popeyes or Wingstop or Slim Chickens or now there's Chick's Filet is coming, there's Dave's Hot Chicken.

16:29We're at a point of oversaturation on most high streets in the UK already. So as a small business trying to grow, they've suddenly come in with tens, hundreds of millions. That's really, really difficult for us. So we're actually pivoting a little bit as a brand and we're launching like Thunderbird's little brother or sister called Strip Shack, which is a much more pared down version, which is sort of designed for grab-and-go locations and places where you're not going to have giant 6 ,000-square-foot Popeyes next to it to try and go to places, stations and airports and all those sorts of places.

17:05And is that happening already? That is happening already, yeah, which is really exciting. So we've got a couple of operating start kitchens. There's one up with Park Dean up in Northumberland, which is slightly inconvenient from London, but still. Time to think on the way up there. Indeed. But it's really, really exciting. And we see a huge opportunity for that one. And where did that idea come from, Matt? Was it simply needs must? Actually, the idea came from a fryer. We found a fryer that doesn't need extraction. So one of the big barriers to us opening restaurants in places is getting enough extraction to remove all that oily air from the fryers.

17:41And we found one that's got built-in extraction. So we sort of built the whole business around that concept. So going into little places around London Bridge Station, and you take over one of those old vape shops or a phone repair shop or something like that, we can put a little strip shack into there. You only need a couple of staff. The fit-out is relatively inexpensive. And while it might only take 10, 15 grand a week, you can really scale those up very, very quickly and make a really good living off it. So again, we're very excited about that opportunity. And not to diminish anything Thunderbird is doing, I still think Thunderbird Fried Chicken has its place and is brilliant and our restaurants are doing great.

18:23But looking at some high streets where you've got three fried chicken shops next to each other, that's a tough battle to go and fight. But he's found the place through a fryer and through the actual utility of the fryer. There you go. He really does know his business. Matt Harris is my business shaper. Thunderbird Chicken, Strip Shack, and the Pickle Project, and there's probably another one coming before the end of this program. You mentioned, you talked about the team and the juxtaposition with the founder playing every single role. What kind of leader are you? Have you looked at other people and go, I want to be like that, or is it just I deal with what I need to deal with?

19:01That's a very good question. I've definitely got better at the leadership side of things. I don't think I was especially inspiring sometimes in the past. Are you happier in the gadgety bit? Are you happier playing and fixing stuff rather than this person, you need to do that, and I need to empower you? Is that not really your thing? That's not really my thing, although I'm a lot, lot better at it than I was in the past. I've learned to deal with that a lot better. I think in my head I've always assumed that, I've been very lucky in that I can pick things up very quickly and sort of learn to fix problems and so on.

19:40I kind of always assume that everyone else is just going to be able to do exactly the same, just as fast, work just as hard, and it doesn't quite work like that. It doesn't work that way. No. So now getting a lot better at that aspect of it. So the bit I was thinking about, I imagine you spend a lot of your time thinking about how you want to improve things, even when you're not quote-unquote at work, which is very normal for a founder anyway, but is that true? Absolutely. Are you always thinking about? Constantly, yeah. Particularly now with the new pickle business and doing things my own slightly daft way, using ultrasound to make the brine for our pickles, which is very unconventional.

20:19Sorry, hold on. Ultrasound to make brine. Why would you use ultrasound to make brine? So the brief answer. The brief answer. So, well, there's a manual actually I've written here already. It's 17 pages. We could be here till 3 o 'clock in the afternoon. But in simple terms. Well, the genesis of the idea for Pickle Project was I'd been looking for good pickles to go to the burgers for Thunderbird for a couple of years and also kind of looking for something else for my brain to get really focused on. and I realized that all the pickles that were available to us were not great. And in my head, I remembered going to Walmart in the US and there's a quarter mile long shelf of pickles.

20:56And then you go to my big local Sainsbury's and there's maybe a foot and a half wide shelf with a couple of jars. I thought, oh my God, there's a huge opportunity here. So then I started playing around with some recipes and stuff. And if you really break it down to its core components, what are pickles? Well, it's a vegetable in a delicious liquid. Who makes the most delicious liquids? Cocktail nerds, or I should probably call them mixologists or whatever they prefer. And I found that quite a lot of them are using ultrasound. So you vacuum pack your raspberries and then put them in a bath with water and then blast it with high-intensity sound waves.

21:34What does a sound wave do? It creates cavitation in the water, which is kind of like it sounds like little cavities. So tiny little voids in the water. and as they implode on themselves, they create shockwaves, which then helps shatter stuff out of other stuff. So scaled that up, now I've got a massive tank that, I think it was sold for cleaning car parts. You put a lorry gearbox in it and it blasts all the dirt off. But it will do the same thing if you put spices and seasonings in stuff. So you get tons of extraction. Whereas traditionally, if you're making pickles, it's cucumbers, vinegar, water, salt, sugar, and then some seeds.

22:11but you know nature's designed a coriander seed or a black peppercorn to grow into a plant so all of the nutrients and stuff are locked up inside so this explodes them out basically and then gives you the flavor it gives you tons and tons of flavor and then also looked at what are the core components of the flavor so dill for example has philandrine and limonene and carvone and all these different flavors so you look at other flavors that are complementary to that and that's led us down a really interesting path if there are some other ingredients in there like we use a tiny bit of mint and cardamom and there's some licorice root and things that you wouldn't traditionally expect all in very small amounts but it just amplifies that pickley flavor to make the pickliest pickles we can possibly pickle pickles we can possibly pickle yeah and and i i've just learned that's your new voice no that is welcome back to you pickles that could possibly pickle That's amazing.

23:06Wow. I mean, I've just never gone so deep inside of a jar of pickles, but now I feel like I have. Final chat with my guest today, Matt Harris, is coming up very shortly, and we can hear more about the tank if we so desire, and the explosions. And we've got some music from Jordan Racka. That's in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal. Matt Harris, my business shaper. Thunderbird Chicken, The Pickle Project. And strip shack, which is the future, I think sounds like a really good idea. I love the way you get into all this, and it is kind of engineering and science, as you said, meets taste, which is fab.

23:46Where does it go from here, Matt? If we're having a conversation in five years, what's the shape of this universe you're creating going to look like? What's strip shack going to be? Is Thunderbird Chicken still going to be there in this guise, do you reckon? And what about the Pickle Project? What's going to happen? Sincerely, I hope so. Yeah, despite everything I've said about, you know, sort of always having a plan or a goal or, you know, I wanted to progress through my tracing crew and all that sort of very ingrained in my head of where I want to be in the future. I've not been that good at five-year plans because everything that I've done historically are miles and miles away from my actual plans.

24:20So where we'll be in five years, I really don't know. I just sincerely hope that Thunderbird is still great and growing and Strip Shack's doing brilliance. And I guess this is going to sound a bit sort of watery-eyed, But when I started, everyone always said, how many restaurants do you want to own? I don't know. Like, you know, 500 is sort of a meaningless number. But what I actually really wanted to create was a business that was kind of loved equally by the people who work for it and the people who shop from it. And if you've done that and built something brilliant that people love, then that's something really great to achieve.