How Nominate Brought Local Flavor to Your Doorstep - Part One

Chris: 00:01:49

I'm Chris Lindstrom, and this is the Food About Town podcast.

Alex: 00:01:53

Rochester. Well, why Rochester?

Chris: 00:01:56

Chris Lindstrom was a hoot. He was just so much fun. He never stopped talking. I mean, it was great.

Alex: 00:02:05

Here's a good idea. Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener, and we don't need.

Chris: 00:02:12

Any characters around to get the joint atmosphere.

Brandon: 00:02:15

Is that clear?

Chris: 00:02:16

Because I'm a pro. That's what pros do. A professional. Look it up in the book. But now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.

And we are back with another episode of the Food About Town podcast. And this is kind of a special one for me.

We've been trying to schedule this for a while, and everybody else is terrible at scheduling everything except for me. So it's taken us. What is it, five. No, seven months now.

Brandon: 00:02:47

At least seven months.

Chris: 00:02:48

Seven months. But we are here to do a recap and talk through our experience running Nominate.

So I think for everybody who listens, you know, listens to the podcast, heard me talk about Nominate a lot over the years, and for everybody that did follow and buy meals over the three years that we did this, just want to thank everybody so much for doing that. But what I really want to do is bring everybody together that was involved with this from the core team and talk through the whole experience.

All guests, why don't you introduce yourselves one by one.

Brandon: 00:03:25

Hey, I am Brandon Voule.

Alex: 00:03:28

I am Alex Voulai.

Nate: 00:03:30

I'm Nate Wager.

Chris: 00:03:32

I'm Rafael Mabassa. So we were the Nominate core team, and I kind of wanted to start from the beginning of how did we end up starting Nominate, and why isn't it?

Why isn't it, frankly?

Alex: 00:03:49

Do you want to take this one or certainly start.

Chris: 00:03:52

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:03:52

When did we start, frankly?

Alex: 00:03:53

want to say somewhere around: 2016

Chris: 00:03:59

Yeah.

Alex: 00:04:00

Yeah. We started around there with myself, Raf, Brandon, Nate.

Chris: 00:04:05

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:04:05

And a few others that have come and gone, but.

Alex: 00:04:07

Right.

Brandon: 00:04:07

We started.

We wanted to start a software service business targeted at the food industry, and not a single one of us had ever worked in or near the food industry.

Chris: 00:04:18

Are you saying that startups love to do software as a service?

Brandon: 00:04:22

100%.

Nate: 00:04:24

Especially when everyone involved is a software developer of some kind.

Chris: 00:04:28

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:04:28

With no experience in or around the.

Alex: 00:04:30

Food industry or running a business, really.

Brandon: 00:04:34

So it was a lot of firsts, and a friend introduced me to Chris here.

Chris: 00:04:40

Yeah. Shout out to Andy Nozel and boo to Andy Nozzle for abandoning all of us to the hinterlands of Buffalo. Ooh, I want to be near my family.

Brandon: 00:04:50

I hope he listens to this.

Chris: 00:04:55

So, yeah, I got involved at that point, and we. We gave it a decent shot at running, frankly, for a few years. You ran into some challenges.

A whole global pandemic thing happened while we were starting to get some momentum.

Brandon: 00:05:11

Well, what was frankly, first, right?

Chris: 00:05:13

Oh, yeah.

So, frankly was we were trying to connect food and beverage from the sources to the places that they sold to, trying to build transparency into distribution so you could make better choices about where to spend your money and then hopefully, you know, help the businesses get the word out about the great work that they were doing.

Brandon: 00:05:35

More simply, you could find. If you were looking for a specific product and they were in the system, you could find where to buy that product.

You could see which farms restaurants were using. You could see which products a store was carrying.

Alex: 00:05:46

Yeah, I think we often use the, I don't know, tagline, catchphrase, Whatever you want to call it that. It was a restaurant's digital chalkboard. Like, you know, you walk into that. Walk into a restaurant, you see their chalkboard. Like, here's all the.

Like, our beef is all from this local farm. We kind of wanted to be a. A digital software version of that for various restaurants.

Nate: 00:06:04

I think what you mean is a. A restaurant's chalkboard, but digital. That's the key to the elevated pitch is you need. You need the comparison with a butt.

Alex: 00:06:11

That's fair.

Chris: 00:06:12

That was pretty good. Yeah.

Alex: 00:06:13

Dot, dot, dot. But digital, right? Yes.

Brandon: 00:06:16

Did you hear we're digital?

Alex: 00:06:18

Yeah, that's right.

Chris: 00:06:18

Wow. They. They have food on computers now.

Brandon: 00:06:21

And we also had some abilities for sellers, distributors, purveyors to find new distribution points, too, if they're looking for new stores to be in. We had the data and the algorithms to figure out, hey, here's some stores that look like some stores you're in currently, maybe reach out to them.

Some restaurants you could reach out to that, you know, might be a good option for you to start selling to.

Alex: 00:06:43

Yeah, a lot of the.

I don't know if we'll dive more into this later, but a lot of the engineering worker, frankly, was actually like, even looking back on it now, like, I'm six years, however many years further along as a software engineer. I look back, we did some crazy stuff.

Brandon: 00:06:57

It was basically a playground for us to kind of just do whatever we wanted.

Alex: 00:07:01

Oh, man. Like, working on, frankly, advanced my career so many years beyond where I would have been otherwise. I learned so many things doing that.

Brandon: 00:07:08

But it turned out that wasn't a great driver to create a business.

Alex: 00:07:13

Yeah, right.

Chris: 00:07:13

Yeah. I think, I think we were close to the moment. Right. We were close to the right moment.

And you know, I've seen other things now, you know, come in that stead that covered a similar ground start to hit. I think we were, we were in the right ballpark and we had built a lot of good platform things.

And as somebody who came in as the non programmer, seeing all of you, you know, build all these features and we're all doing this in our, you know, part time. None of us quit our jobs to do this. So to see all the things that we were able to build.

And I thought we were really close to the right platform when, you know, the middle of the pandemic hit.

Brandon: 00:07:55

Yeah. And it just took us too long to get there. And that's a mistake we didn't repeat with Curate and Nominate.

Chris: 00:08:00

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:08:01

And again, this is our first business.

We had no idea what we were doing and we spent a year or two building the platform before we even had something that we thought was usable or sellable. Right. And that's obviously a mistake I wouldn't repeat if I were to start a business again. And it's something we didn't do with Nominate.

We took the opposite approach. What can we start doing today that'll help people without writing any code whatsoever? And kind of worked out.

Chris: 00:08:26

ur first event was in January: 2021

Alex: 00:08:34

Oh my God.

Chris: 00:08:36

And as Brandon mentioned, we did the first event with borderline no planning whatsoever.

Brandon: 00:08:43

We had a Google form or HubSpot form or something that allowed people to sign up. And there was some janky checkout system that just got people.

Alex: 00:08:52

I don't even think we had Curate email addresses at the time. I think, I think it was also under our framework.

Brandon: 00:08:57

I want to talk about how we also got to in the first place.

Chris: 00:09:01

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:09:02

So like Chris said, we had gotten to a point with frankly where we were thought we were doing pretty well. We had onboarded a couple local businesses. We were. Had cash flow, not much, but something.

And then when the pandemic hit, that obviously tanked what we were doing. The restaurant industry was hit very hard by the pandemic. And we tried to go for six more months or so to see what happened.

And obviously we all know what happened.

And in that post pandemic world, we didn't really think that there was a place for something like frankly, which came about in the height of the farm to table movement that was no longer a thing people were really focused on.

Chris: 00:09:40

Yeah, they were kind of focused on, can we stay open for another week?

Alex: 00:09:44

Yeah.

Chris: 00:09:44

And another month and then another three months. And that was like the core focus of every business we talked to at that point.

Brandon: 00:09:51

So we wanted to find a way to help these restaurants survive.

Alex: 00:09:55

I think. Yeah, I think most restaurants we came across just were so strapped for cash flow or anything that no one was really.

Whereas before the pandemic, we would talk to different local restaurants about what it would cost to onboard with, frankly, and they would go, oh, yeah, that's nothing to us. That's what we pay in probably broken dishware every month or whatever. No one cared.

But yeah, once the pandemic hit, that story completely changed and it kind of was the. Was the. What's the term? Looking for the end or the doom song of our business model there.

Chris: 00:10:27

Yeah, I mean, if we're using business terms, that was like we had a forced pivot at that point.

Alex: 00:10:32

Right.

Chris: 00:10:32

Because basically we.

We had no path forward except for waiting the pandemic out to make that happen or either completely changing that and staying with something like it, or doing what we ended up doing, which is, you know, trying to try to put money directly into the pockets of businesses. And the way our focus ended up going was on small minority owned restaurants versus trying to publicize every restaurant.

We had to pick a focus and trying to do it in the way that was most equitable to the restaurants.

Brandon: 00:11:06

And I don't want to take full credit for this idea either. We had heard of a food tour company in Columbus.

Chris: 00:11:13

Yeah, I think it was Columbus.

Brandon: 00:11:14

Yeah, they were doing something pretty similar. Not exactly what we were doing, but they obviously weren't doing food tours during the pandemic.

So they partnered with the restaurants that were on the food tour path usually.

And every week, I forget how often it happened, but people would sign up and then they would get a email saying, hey, today you can go pick up your food from this restaurant. So a little bit different than what we were doing, but same kind of concept, you know, helping restaurants stay open during the pandemic.

Chris: 00:11:39

Yeah. And I think the. The biggest shift from that was it seemed like it was a lot.

In a lot of ways like a food tour still, where the restaurants were subsidizing the cost of that to the tours to facilitate it through publicity, which is a complet. Completely viable business model and good for the restaurants if it works.

And at that point, I think with, you know, all the things that are going on during the pandemic from, you know, all the. All the Black Lives Matter protests to everything else. The, you know, it didn't feel right, at least to me.

And I kind of pushed this angle on it, is that I didn't want to take money from places. I wanted to give money to places.

Brandon: 00:12:26

That's what we did with Curate and Nominate. We never charge the restaurants a penny.

Chris: 00:12:30

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:12:30

But I have a feeling a lot of people listening right now might. It's possible they don't know what Nominate is.

Chris: 00:12:34

Yes.

Brandon: 00:12:34

You want to give your usual elevator pitch.

Chris: 00:12:37

Yeah.

Alex: 00:12:37

Oh. So for old times sake, I just want to hear it one more time.

Chris: 00:12:40

You know, one take, just for the road. So concept behind Nominate, Curate, when we started was that our customers would order a meal for two. End price was $40.

Started at $35, where you'd buy a meal for two from us. @ first we delivered it directly to you.

Brandon: 00:13:02

But this was the height of the pandemic. No one was going anywhere.

Chris: 00:13:05

Right. So we delivered all the food. But basically you bought a meal for two.

You had no idea what you're getting until you picked it up or it was delivered to you. And the big crux of it was we wanted to make sure that the whole experience was a win for everybody involved.

So we paid the restaurants, at minimum, 90% of retail for their food. We bought it all on a quiet day. Usually it was Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, depending on what phase of the project we were in.

We picked up earlier in the day before the dinner rush so that they could bulk their food. They didn't have to customize everything.

It was really about making it efficient for the restaurants, giving a fun experience to our customers, and they didn't have to worry about thinking about what to buy for dinner that night. So the goal was really to make sure everybody in the chain was successful and not just us, because that's.

Most of the platforms that exist are, you know, created to extract as much money as possible from every participant.

Brandon: 00:14:07

I would say we charged. We. Sorry.

We paid anywhere between menu price for a lot of places or catering prices, depending on the order and the restaurant and how they wanted to work with us.

Alex: 00:14:15

Yeah. So Chris brought up, you know, a lot of the things we did to try and be efficient and not bother restaurants. And I'm.

I'm excited to dive into some of our events and go over, like, the chronology of our events, because I think back to what things were on event one and then how much we improved our process over time, you know, as a foreshadow, I guess.

There were times when we were like on essentially like sitting in chairs or on our knees on the floor of a restaurant packing up bags while they're trying to serve customers live. Right.

Brandon: 00:14:43

Couple times we definitely had some customers in store in restaurants like looking at us like, like, what are you doing here? Get out of my way. I'm trying to order my food.

Chris: 00:14:51

Oh God. So let me, let me pivot back just so we can. Let me set the table for what we accomplished over the three years. So we ran events for over three years.

st to March: 2024

And we put over $65,000 back into small restaurants pockets during a lot of tough times. So that's setting the table for that whole time that we did this.

So we started with, we started with Marty's Meats but we ended up working with a ton of different places in Rochester. So let's talk about the delivery times.

Brandon: 00:15:55

It was over 50 restaurants, right?

Chris: 00:15:57

Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, over 60 total.

Brandon: 00:15:59

60 different restaurants in Rochester.

Alex: 00:16:00

Yeah. The delivery time.

We can talk about the very first event which was, it was kind of unique because it was kind of a test run of the process and we didn't really open it up public.

Brandon: 00:16:08

Soft launch. For sure.

Alex: 00:16:09

It was a soft launch. Yeah. You know, we, we mostly reached out to family of ours, close friends, just kind of to get feedback and see. Was this something you even enjoyed?

See if how the logistics worked for us as the curate team.

Chris: 00:16:22

Yeah. And that was a lot of stuff. It was a good time and you know, we were successful in our test.

Then we opened it up to our first actual event with our friends from Zemeta. Ethiopian I think. Got to be one of our top favorites over the entire length of our run.

Brandon: 00:16:38

I think more than most other restaurants.

Alex: 00:16:39

I think I saw they just reopened too, right?

Chris: 00:16:41

Yeah, yeah, I think they were, they were on hiatus. I think they had gone back for a little bit.

Alex: 00:16:45

Yeah. But I still eat there.

Chris: 00:16:48

Yeah. Well, I remember when, you know, some, you know, I don't know if everybody had had it before.

I know I'd had it a lot of times, but I don't, I don't think you had had it before, right, Alex?

Alex: 00:16:56

I, I had tried to go one time when I was working in the city and they weren. But I mean now I go all the time.

Brandon: 00:17:02

Most of those 60 restaurants were our first time too.

Alex: 00:17:05

Yeah, most of them.

Chris: 00:17:06

I was gonna say, like, other than, you know, a few places per person, this was. It was a lot of exploration for almost everybody. I mean, I did.

We dragged Nate out from, like, the hinterlands of the suburbs to come taste all these things. I think you did live in the city at that point.

Nate: 00:17:26

No, no.

Chris: 00:17:27

Where you. I thought you were still in the southwest when we started.

Nate: 00:17:29

When. When Curate started. I was. I was solidly in Pittsford.

Chris: 00:17:32

Oh, geez.

Brandon: 00:17:33

Because you just gotten back.

Nate: 00:17:34

Because we had just gotten back from our. Our, you know, cross country adventure, so.

Chris: 00:17:40

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:17:40

But back to our.

Nate: 00:17:41

Yeah, it's actually. It's funny because you guys are referencing the delivery experience that I have very little memory of because I was just completely.

Brandon: 00:17:48

You didn't help with that through the entire thing.

Nate: 00:17:53

I'm pretty sure I was there. I just don't think I was awake for it because I had a newbo at the time.

Alex: 00:17:58

When we started doing delivery. Like, I guess when we first started, were we manually doing the routing or did we already have like, a service?

Brandon: 00:18:04

Found something in shop. There was an app in Shopify that helped us do the routing.

Nate: 00:18:08

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, we used up until we finished delivering.

Brandon: 00:18:12

Up until they killed off the app.

Alex: 00:18:14

Yeah.

Nate: 00:18:15

Did they kill off the.

Brandon: 00:18:15

Killed off. They killed off the delivery app.

Nate: 00:18:17

Stopped delivering.

Chris: 00:18:18

Yeah.

Nate: 00:18:19

It was as we were tapering down delivery.

Brandon: 00:19:11

There was actually an app before Shopify that I actually had gotten from Donnie.

Chris: 00:19:15

You and I both used.

Brandon: 00:19:16

Yeah, Yeah. I went. I met with Donnie.

Chris: 00:19:17

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:19:18

Clutterbuck. And I'm like, hey, we're doing this thing. Any advice? I know you're doing delivery with cure right now.

And he had sent me some app that they were using to like help route. It was pretty manual still, but it was better than nothing.

Chris: 00:19:30

Yeah. We're using a couple times using websites and we're just trying any way we.

Brandon: 00:19:34

Something. Yep.

Chris: 00:19:36

It's like. It's like, oh, yeah, we're going back to like, early comp Sci. How do you optimize a route?

Brandon: 00:19:42

It was very boots on the ground work.

Chris: 00:19:44

Yeah. So. And you know, for a while we did delivery, you know, both ourselves and with a group of different drivers, we drove every meal to every house for.

Was it almost six months in a wide range.

Brandon: 00:19:59

We didn't limit. If you were in the Rochester. Greater Rochester area, we would deliver to you. We didn't say no to anybody.

Alex: 00:20:05

Yeah.

Brandon: 00:20:06

We were driving everywhere from Sea Breeze to Fairport to, you know, way out.

Alex: 00:20:12

On the west part of that.

Nate: 00:20:14

That app is. Well, part of the Shopify experience was figuring out how to lock down the locations we would allow to order.

And I think we ended up going on zip codes for a while.

Chris: 00:20:23

Right.

Alex: 00:20:23

I think that's the best we could do in very. Yeah, right. We ran into some problems because some zip codes would extend like just a straight little sliver of land way out.

Brandon: 00:20:32

There were some zip codes that were in Rochester, then basically went down to Pennsylvania.

Alex: 00:20:36

Right?

Chris: 00:20:36

Yeah, yeah, it was. It was wild to, you know, go through all of that. And we did have a lot of help because we.

We did a lot of the delivery ourselves, but we had a great crew of different drivers. So just wanted to shout out Chris Goodenberry, Jim Lake, who delivered until we stopped, basically those two.

Matt Austin, you know, my co founder in the Lunchador, and we had some Buffalo friends come out as well.

Brandon: 00:21:02

Just for the experience.

Chris: 00:21:03

Yeah, just for the experience.

Alex: 00:21:04

We want to shout out like. Like a. Quinn Sturge helped us. Matt Brockinier helped us. Ben Crosgrove.

Chris: 00:21:11

Yeah, no, it was. It was amazing having so much help because we did.

Every time we did these events, we went to the restaurant, we bagged everything up and we brought it out and did want to bring up the one that got mentioned earlier. We were picking up from a restaurant called El Latino over on Charlie Ave. Great Dominican restaurant.

Brandon: 00:21:34

And those guys do awesome. They did not need our help.

Chris: 00:21:37

No, no. So we walked.

Alex: 00:21:39

Credible.

Chris: 00:21:39

Yeah. We walked in and we were picking up a lot of food. It was probably 60 people worth of food.

And when we showed up, there was already a line out of the door because our orders were delaying everybody else's orders.

Brandon: 00:21:54

A lot of evil looks from people.

Chris: 00:21:56

Oh, God, the looks people are giving us while we're bringing out bag after bag after bag of food. We're just like death stares.

Brandon: 00:22:06

Let's. Let's leave quick.

Alex: 00:22:07

Let's get out there.

Brandon: 00:22:09

Some hungry people.

Alex: 00:22:10

You don't want to stand between a hungry person and their meal.

Chris: 00:22:13

And we were. Dominican food. No, it's so good. But we had.

We had some real amazing restaurants during that time that we had worked with for the first time, including Zometa Pepper Pot, which turned out to be another great partner. Marlene doing Jamaican food. We worked with her a number of times. Sodom, Korean Food, Swan Market, German and that.

Those are a lot of the places that really helped us while we were learning how to do what we did.

Brandon: 00:22:47

And I think what kickstarted a lot of it for us was your first.

Chris: 00:22:50

Your time on Connections Yeah, so it was.

It was an amazing experience to talk about a project that wasn't, you know, me writing about food or talking about a general topic, actually doing something to put money in the pockets of restaurants. And at that time, they weren't really doing a lot of in studio stuff.

So, you know, did the call here at home, and we got so many great customers that ended up being regulars for the entire run after that from, you know, Evan and Megan, the whole team over at Connections for, you know, platforming people who were trying to do great things during that time and continuing until now.

Brandon: 00:23:34

I think that's also where our friend Chris Crockey heard about us for the first time.

Alex: 00:23:38

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, I don't remember what restaurant it was or the specifics of the event.

I just remember the event we had immediately after Chris was on Connections was like one of our biggest events.

Brandon: 00:23:49

We had like, wow, this might actually work.

Alex: 00:23:51

Yeah, we had so many orders that time. I remember.

Chris: 00:23:54

Yeah.

And that was, you know, that started our kind of our roller coaster of sales was, you know, you get the big bumps from the media pushes and then things roll and then something else happens and they bounce and they go up and down. But as was mentioned, this was. This was the.

That was the time when Chris Crocke from the historic German House reached out to us to possibly host our events. Not where we had to deliver every meal, which was, you know, one.

Another one of those heartening moments in our journey where somebody said, hey, I believe in what you're doing. Come do it over here. Let's try to do something cool. Um, and that started off a hell of a run with us over at the German House.

Brandon: 00:24:46

Chris really kicked off our face to face connections with our customers.

Chris: 00:24:49

Oh, absolutely. And we had so many opportunities to, at that point, completely change how we did this whole experience.

Alex: 00:24:58

Oh, yeah.

I think having a dedicated, consistent pickup place, really, it created so much more of an experience because now instead of just getting food dropped off at your door, like anywhere else, you're coming in, you're hearing Chris talk about the food, talk about the restaurant, everything Chris is selling you wine or cider pairings to go with the food. And then even in the summer, I think we set up some tables outside, people could stay there and eat. Like that was like the first real. Like you.

I don't want to say first unique experience, but it was the first real. It felt like it was the first.

Brandon: 00:25:27

Thing that was an experience, right?

Alex: 00:25:28

Yeah, it felt very much like our home there for that, for that Time.

Chris: 00:25:32

Yeah.

Because before that, the thing that people knew was, was the design and the concept and shout out to, you know, Raf for being an amazing designer, you know, you know, coming up with both of the logos that we ended up with that were the signature for what people knew us for. And then, you know, helping out with getting all. Getting the website right and making sure our experience was good.

And that was a big part of making sure when people got to see our stuff that they felt like we were, we were serious about it. Like we were about the food. And that was, you know, Raf was. You were a huge part of that.

Brandon: 00:26:09

One of the things, one of the undertones that Chris is getting at here is the flip side to frankly, which is a heavily software engineering driven project, was that Curate Nominate was a very, very small piece of software engineering and it was mostly boots on the ground, a lot of Chris's work, getting the restaurants onboarded in person meetups kind of thing.

Alex: 00:26:32

Yeah. Like when I think of. So anyone doesn't know, like I did most of the back end software engineering for Nominate Curate. Like.

Brandon: 00:26:40

Yeah, it still existed still.

Alex: 00:26:42

Yeah, we still had that stuff. We still had database information. I think the most complex thing we even had to do was automated emails, which Chris can probably talk about.

But it saved us. It saved us one time for a pickup. I remember.

Chris: 00:26:54

Yeah, we, we. I mean we've had. We had so many little things go on, on with those kind of, you know, planning out emails and learning how to do all these things.

And yeah, it was. There certainly was, you know, the programming and software and making the website and the database work. But comparatively to frankly it was.

We used some of those things for this and then otherwise once it was built, it was more static.

Alex: 00:27:20

Yeah. Curate was not software as a service, like frankly was. It was very. It was a people thing.

Nate: 00:27:26

Yeah, for sure. And you know, from a technical perspective, it was like all integration work.

It was all, you know, this takes Shopify's stuff for this and HubSpot for that and yeah, some out of the box AWS stuff.

Chris: 00:27:39

Yeah. And it was. Wasn't nearly like your lift, like frankly was Nate.

Because that was like, you know, you were, you know, architecting those things and really driving. Driving all the core things and everything else. And it's. This is a wholly different animal.

Brandon: 00:27:56

Should we talk about one of our first learning experiences?

Chris: 00:27:59

Yeah. Before we do that, I did want to, you know, take a second to talk about Chris Crockey for just a bit more. Definitely.

Because he really did help us focus on presentation on Logistics on paying attention to all the little things. And although we had our moments of clash, because his standards and his dedication are second to almost anybody I know he is. He is.

He cares hard, like I do, about things, and that means at times we clash because his standards are so high that we couldn't. We couldn't end up meeting some of them sometimes. But by forcing us to try to meet those standards, we got wildly better.

We got wildly better at every aspect of running Curate at that time, meaning we figured out how to run events in person, we figured out how to brand. You know, we had. Then we had stamps for our bags, we had, you know, table runners, we had graphics, we had. We had this. We were doing videos on site.

And we really, you know, we had started doing beverage pairings as, like, emails.

Brandon: 00:29:20

But so many of those things were just Chris saying, hey, you guys should try this or do this.

Alex: 00:29:25

I really want to stress that Chris was not just like an idol host to us. I mean, he was very much. He was invested and he was a part of the experience, like he wanted us to do well.

He was there just as talkative as any of us with all of our customers, explaining the food, the pairings that he recommended, all of that. He was very involved with us.

Nate: 00:29:44

Yeah, I always found him to be a very, like, serendipitous partner just because he had a software development education and background. He was this guy that came in with all this.

This hospitality experience, but also knew what was possible with software and what was possible sort of with more technical implementations under the hood for things.

Chris: 00:30:05

So, yeah, it really did make a difference.

And I'd say he had the biggest influence out of anybody other than the core team throughout our entire run because he believed in what we were doing and pushed us when we needed to be pushed. And we did have some amazing drink pairings and experiences at. At the German House, so Amazing wines.

And, I mean, we had a lot of evenings just sitting and tasting with distributors coming in. We get distributors dropping off wine.

Brandon: 00:30:36

You guys want to taste some wine?

Chris: 00:30:37

Sure.

Brandon: 00:30:38

I guess we have to if.

Chris: 00:30:39

If we have to. Yeah. And that did bring us to some of our. Some of our challenges that we did.

Brandon: 00:30:46

While we're talking about people that helped us, I want to also shout out to Matt Foley, too.

Chris: 00:30:49

Oh, yeah.

Brandon: 00:30:50

Entrepreneur in residence at High tech Rochester, now Nexcor. And he basically taught us how to run a business at all, because we had no idea how to do that.

Alex: 00:30:58

Yeah, we still hang out with Matt all the time, too. Great guy. Awesome dude.

Chris: 00:31:02

Yeah. And That's. That's a great point to, you know, between Matt and, you know, the next core team for kicking us off during our, frankly days. And we.

We didn't continue in there, but, you know, the lessons we learned from being part of that, you know, turned us into the. Turned us into what we were with.

Brandon: 00:31:20

And Matt still stuck by us even through even once we left nexcore. Maybe nexcore doesn't want to hear that, but. But Matt was still around for us, helping us every step of the way.

Chris: 00:31:30

And I certainly don't have a key fob that's still sitting on my keys that I certainly shouldn't return.

Brandon: 00:31:35

What are we doing?

Alex: 00:31:37

He was a semi regular customer, too, even.

Chris: 00:31:39

Yeah, it was awesome. And yeah, we had a lot of great events there, and we did have some logistical challenges at times, so we're going to pepper those in as we go on.

But I do want to bring up a couple because really what these ended up being are the lessons that turned us into a much better platform.

Brandon: 00:31:59

There were little learning experiences every event, but there were certainly some where we're like, oh, shit, this can't happen again.

Chris: 00:32:05

Yeah.

So the first was a restaurant that we worked with where, you know, I thought, you know, the food we had was really good, but at that point, we didn't really do testing of how much volume was coming in for the.

Brandon: 00:32:22

Orders or the quality or anything. We didn't. We didn't have any demo or test meals at the time. We. It was a good restaurant.

We told them the deal, here's money, here's what we're gonna get. We'll pick up the food soon.

Chris: 00:32:33

Yeah. Our message to the restaurants was, we want this to be a really good meal for two people.

And that was our guidance, was, hey, there has to be, like, two dishes, and it has to be, you know, a solid meal for two people. And on that day, our. You know, we were actually using a partner that day.

So we had a charity that was part of this event, and we picked up the food, and I'd say it was no more than a person and a quarter of food.

Brandon: 00:33:02

That's being generous.

Chris: 00:33:03

Yeah.

And I think it was before we left the German house, one of our regular customers called me on my cell phone and said, geez, I'm not sure what's going on, guys. This. This didn't really meet the standards that we were doing. We were already talking about it. And that call, you never want that call.

Brandon: 00:33:27

Our customers that weren't afraid to give feedback really helped us. Absolutely should Never be afraid to give feedback to the businesses you like.

Alex: 00:33:33

Yeah, I actually. There was a period of time I really looked forward to the event feedback every single week because it helped us grow so much.

I mean, we can talk more later about all the things that came out of it, but those customers helped us dramatically.

Brandon: 00:33:47

One situation was the first time we had to give refunds, and we. We just did that automatically. We gave everyone.

I forget what it was, but we gave everyone a pretty substantial refund back for their meals because we. We just were not happy with the quality or the quantity of the meal.

Chris: 00:33:59

Yeah. And that was, you know, they had reached out because, you know, they were. They were doing events with their family. Right.

This was like, this was their opportunity to get together in challenging times and go through that. And it was. It was great because we just said, yeah, we're going to do the right thing. We're not going to wait for more complaints.

We're not going to wait for people to complain to refund them. We're just going to do it because we want to stand behind everything we did every day. And that was something we started then.

Then we started doing demo meals. So we did demo meals. So when people showed up, we had already tested it. We already knew that the quantity was good and the food was good.

Brandon: 00:34:41

Yeah.

From there on out, we never did any meal unless it was a restaurant we had already worked with, sometimes without first going in and actually getting the meal that we are going to be serving to people.

Chris: 00:34:51

Yeah. I think the last one we're going to talk about before we go to break, I am going to bring up the name of the restaurant because this was.

This was a combination. Right. So I'll say this was. This was before that incident.

And I would say this was a lesson that I learned because I had failed in clear communication. I thought I had done a great job in communicating the needs of how many meals we were going to get.

And you know that, hey, we need to pick up at this time. You need to make this many meals. I thought I had done a great job, and I showed up and there was half the amount of food made that I had planned on.

Brandon: 00:35:31

And that's all they had.

Chris: 00:35:32

Yeah. And that's all they had. So I am going to bring up the name of the restaurant because this was also, I'd say, in the top five best meals we had.

Brandon: 00:35:43

We were so excited for it.

Alex: 00:35:44

I still eat there to this day. I know what you're talking about.

Chris: 00:35:47

So that. That's Camara's West African, which is up on, up on Lyle Ave now.

So they're, they're a Liberian restaurant and this was, this is a place we had actually gone together to eat as a team. So we went, we went when was over on South Plymouth and we ate there and we were just so blown away by the quality and quantity of the food.

It was astonishing, the value. And it was also our opportunity to talk about the roots of American food and Caribbean food and everything else. And we were so excited.

And then, you know, they had half the food ready when we started and then over the course of the next hour and a half, they had made as much food as they could make to make everybody whole.

Brandon: 00:36:33

And we ran back and forth five or six times just, you know, having our customers, hey, sorry, wait, food's still coming. We would bring back two to three meals at a time to serve to customers as they came in.

And I think by the end of the night, I don't think anyone knew. Yeah, I think it was only us that knew.

Alex: 00:36:51

Only us internally and like one other customer that we knew very, very well.

Brandon: 00:36:55

Yeah, one of the customers was your brother in law. Yeah, hey, sorry.

Alex: 00:36:59

They all got full meals. They just got like two chicken meals instead of.

Brandon: 00:37:03

Didn't get the peanut butter soup, which is unfortunate. Sorry, dude.

Chris: 00:37:06

One of, one of the best things I think maybe ever could be the single best thing we had over the whole whole round are pretty damn close.

Alex: 00:37:14

I wouldn't fight you on that. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's one of the.

Nate: 00:37:16

Few meals that I like remember all the details of.

Alex: 00:37:19

Like, yeah, so good.

Chris: 00:37:21

Just really stands out and you know, shout out to the team for doing amazing work and I could not recommend going.

Brandon: 00:37:27

And Kamaras, everyone hustled.

Alex: 00:37:28

Yeah, yeah.

Chris: 00:37:29

Going over to visit them and go eat there. It is amazing food and you learn so much about the foods of everywhere from the West African diaspora that you can taste that food.

But that was another lesson that, hey, after that we did emails.

Brandon: 00:37:45

I think you and I looked at your texts with them and we're like, oh shit, it's our fault.

Alex: 00:37:51

Yeah, yeah. We started doing invoices after that. So they knew.

Brandon: 00:37:55

Very, very clear invoices.

Alex: 00:37:56

I don't know if just another improvement we made as we talk about our enhancements and efficiency along the way. This kind of goes back to the LDT conversation is we would start dropping off empty bags at restaurants the night before.

Thermal bags, like, yeah, thermal bags. So the food would stay hot and we'd ask the restaurant like, hey, fill these bags for us. Like, we'll be here tomorrow to pick it up.

And that way it was more touch points. More touch points. Easier for us. And easier for them, too. Better for their, them and their.

Like, we talked about all the angry customers at all Latino staring at us. No more of that.

Chris: 00:38:26

You know, yeah, we had hotter food. We had better quality. And it was, it was another great lesson that every step along the way tightened up our process.

We'll be back next time with more on the Food About Sound podcast. And keep nominating all the great places in Rochester and Buffalo. This has been a presentation of the lunchroom or podcast network.

Yes, we're coming up on a major election, but what I really want you to do, I want you to join the nomination. It's the only thing that matters.