Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/654717
q&a involving weekend and dinner service in more residential areas. In early 2015, Eskin secured a third round of funding—$15 million in series C funding—bringing the total investment in the business to $21.5 million. While initially planning to grow Dig Inn by another five stores last year, Eskin purposefully put the brakes on growth plans to maintain the chain's core identity and mission. Eskin recently spoke to Specialty Food Magazine about meeting the challenges of scaling up while maintaining his business' core mission, among other topics. One of the challenges you've identified in scaling up is developing a pipeline of crew members and managers who share your values and approach to food. What are the issues you're facing, and how have you worked to meet them? Ultimately, we want to build a business and a community that has real impact and a role in changing the way we eat. We are developing our culture and our business model in a way that can satisfy the chal- lenges of scaling our model, and people are instrumental. One of the challenges is a lagging workforce that hasn't quite caught up with the consumer migration away from fast food toward faster prepared, high- quality vegetables and ingredients. How those quick-service restaurant crew members were trained was much more about pushing buttons and automation, than in caring for and having a passion for the food you're preparing and serving. How do we repurpose this workforce to think about and work with food in a completely different way? At the same time, there is an industry-wide problem of find- ing good chefs, good leaders, because there is so much demand. It's starting to inform the way we recruit from being less about hard skills-based recruiting, like asking, "Can you do X, Y, and Z, and have you handled food before?" to being much more about soft skills recruiting. We're asking, "Do you have a passion for food? Where do you see yourself in six, 12, 24 months? Do you enjoy serving people and having them enjoy it? Does that get you going?" While we talk to people with culinary chops and experience, we're also happy to talk to individuals for whom food is a fundamental part of their lifestyles but who can't afford culinary school. We're developing a training program and environment to recruit the kind of people who will be a part of our mission. When you come to Dig Inn, you get an education in culinary leadership beyond that which you get anywhere else. It will take time for this type of program to catch on, but it's a long-term investment. Beyond recruitment, how do you work to maintain the Dig Inn mission and experience on a day-to-day basis, particularly as you're expanding your number of outlets? A big part of it is ongoing culinary education outside of the four walls of any particular chef's or cook's day-to-day. One way is to bring them up to the test kitchen. Even though cooks go into work know- ing they're grilling the same chicken, or cooking the same brussels sprouts for a couple of months, there are other aspects of cooking they're getting exposed to. We also have a farm trip once a quarter. They hop on the bus, spend the day on the farm, learn about what that particular partner is growing, and why he or she is growing it this way. It's all a part of getting closer to the whole experience. Also, as leaders in the organization, it's important that we're physically present in these restaurants. A few months ago we had the best week in the company's history in terms of sales performance. It was exciting, but with 450 some odd hourly workers on our team, not every single worker was aware of it or how the work he or she does every day played into it. It's not any one person or any one idea—it's 450 people across the team—all that collaborative work and commitment to what we do, that generates sales revenue. To date, the chain has 11 locations in Manhattan Dig Inn focuses heavily on vegetable-centric meals 98 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com