Hi Square Sellers, for this feature we connected with AJ Brown, Chef/Owner of Knead Bakehouse in St. Louis to talk about their inspiring approach to business. They’ve incorporated a bakery and deli model with both online and offline sales. Let’s explore the mechanics that make it all work.
Menu Design
Our concept focuses on American classics that people love. We offer iconic categories that are instantly recognizable. We bake bread, make sandwiches, soups and salads. People are already familiar with it. We also offer a lot of traditional deli sides: pickles, pasta salads, potato salads, broccoli salads. The difference is we take it a little further. If the general public is expecting it to be at 75%, we look for an additional 25% of enhancement. We need to take those classics to a new level.
In terms of how it’s described on the menu, it should sound good on paper and stay basically within the basic constraints of the dish. From there, we figure out how we can do it better than anyone else. Instead of making it overly complicated or pretentious, we focus on improving. We use high quality, local Missouri ingredients which is a good start. We strive to create something people understand but are surprised how good it is. It’s so important to stay within our lane and focus on our core offering. We also have to create enough variety for our customers to happily eat here a couple times a month. In that regard, menu size and rotation is a delicate balance. A well-designed menu is at the core of a strong restaurant business model.
Cooks are creative people. We need menu items that are exciting for us to make day in and day out. If it’s too concise, it gets boring really quickly and not just for the customer. When you have employees that are bored, they won’t produce great food if they aren’t passionate and excited. It’s a never ending journey to drive that level of engagement.
Template Approach
For our menu, the items are consistent year round with set changes (the set is the sub-components of a primary dish) based on seasonal ingredients throughout the year. So we’ll rotate the supporting cast of a key sandwich with a seasonal product. It starts with the master template but it still gives us a ton of room to play, to innovate, and to offer enough variety to our regular customers.
Creativity Cuts Both Ways
Creativity is essential but too much will make a dish cloudy and confusing. It’s so easy to overthink a recipe instead of keeping it super simple. An example is our broccoli salad. It has just enough enhancements and is still on brand for us. It has golden raisins, house-pickled red onions, and uses our Bakehouse curried-infused dressing. We cross-sell the dressing which is available bottled for retail. It’s the differentiator for the salad so we always look for ways to highlight our retail products: our dressings, pickles, compound butters, and jams on the menu. It’s an approach that’s working well for us and it allows all these products to have an online and offline sales channel.
Seasonality
We explore the best ways to use local, hyper-seasonal products but are also business-minded about how we utilize each ingredient. We do a lot of jarring and jamming of ingredients when they are at their peak. We can then use them year round. We’ll make a fig preserve or a strawberry lemon verbena jam. We can rotate them throughout the year for our grilled cheese sandwiches.
What we’ve found is that the seasonal product needs to work well within the system of the menu model, not the other way around. That might be different if you were a high-end, fine dining restaurant but that’s not us. As we highlight a new retail product, it promotes sales for our Square Online Store and in-store customers wanting to take a pantry product home. We love the synergy and the framework this creates. Some of our products will show up on our menu in 4 or 5 dishes. We’re able to continue to tell the story of a seasonal product respectfully all year long.
Team Culture
I have very talented chefs that I brainstorm with every day. It’s so important to include people in the process. I work really hard to incorporate their ideas into the process. If you have a lot of passion for the process, you can find magic within the details of repetition. You have to find a way for your team to fall in love with the journey. “We are always thinking about how we can get better at a specific task and make it more efficient.”
I constantly let my team know their contribution is valuable. For example, a cook is going to break down the hot line everyday. That could be seen as tedious but I teach approaching it with integrity and respect. Bread needs to be shaped every single day. There is a meditative flow to it. When you’re going to do the same task thousands of times, you have to focus on the smallest details, how it touches the tables, the difference between temperatures. It’s essential to learn to enjoy the process.
It’s as important to communicate your story to your employees as it is to your customers. My job is to point us in the right direction. I make sure everyone on the team understands the vision every day.
Core Values
We are constantly evaluating the benefits of tradition versus the potential benefits of innovation. If there is a tradition that has value then it should be treasured. If there is a tradition that doesn’t have value or we don’t understand then we need to be innovative. People like being a part of that process of problem solving. It’s vital to find ways for your team to have a strong sense of ownership, to see and understand the importance of their hard work.
Final Thoughts
By creating a menu system that integrates their own pantry products, Knead Bakehouse has developed a nice synergy between their Square Online Store and on-premise offering. They also have a really intentional and empowering approach to their process and team culture. It will be exciting to seem their modern deli business model continue to evolve and scale over time.
