Extra Serving: A restaurant industry podcast Nation's Restaurant News

This week on Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurants News, editor-in-chief Sam Oches sits down with Just Salad supply chain and sustainability manager Alex Harden to talk about the brand’s innovation around sustainable operations and packaging.
This interview, conducted on the floor of the recent National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago, uncovers why Just Salad is so committed to sustainable operations, how it’s successfully rolled out platforms like reuseable bowls and menu carbon labeling, and how it markets those efforts to customers at its nearly 80 locations.

This week on Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurant News, senior food and beverage editor Bret Thorn sat down with Becca McIntyre, VP of culinary and supply chain at Craveworthy Brands.
Craveworthy has been on a tear lately, adding Untamed Brands, parent company of Taim Mediterranean Kitchen and Hot Chicken Takeover, to its robust portfolio in May of this year. The restaurant group, founded just last year, owns over a dozen restaurants, including legacies, emerging concepts, and virtual brands. McIntyre described the company as “such a melting pot of where flavors belong.”
Thorn and McIntyre talked about how these acquisitions impact the culinary side of the business, including how she approaches any changes she may want to make to menus. The also talked about consumers’ price sensitivity, among other things.

In this special bonus episode of Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurant News, editor-in-chief Sam Oches sits down with colleague Jonathan Maze, editor-in-chief of Restaurant Business, to debrief their time at the National Restaurant Association Show.
From THC drinks to snacks, there was plenty of food and beverage to discuss, but the editors were clear on one thing: technology investment remains critical.
Technology in the restaurant industry can feel overly theoretical when operators talk about artificial intelligence, data, and the like. But the exhibition halls of the National Restaurant Show were full of practical case studies for how tech companies, often working together through tech stack integrations, are saving restaurants time and money, enabling them to scale.
One such partnership is the CAKE point-of-sale system by Mad Mobile and the DAVO sales tax solution developed by Avalara. Bryon Kunkel of Mad Mobile and Cristine Vickery of Avalara spoke with Oches to explain how the hardware and software create automation to maximize a foodservice operator’s return on investment.
Through its integration with CAKE, the DAVO application pulls the day’s transactions for each restaurant and automates the calculation of sales tax due to state and federal agencies and the depositing of those funds into a withholding account, so that taxes are paid on time. The benefits go beyond mitigating the risk of tax penalties, the executives said, including significant time given back to the operator by replacing a tedious manual process with automation.

This week on Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurant News, we’re sharing a recent conversation between NRN senior editor Joanna Fantozzi, and Smokey Mo’s president Craig Haley.
Smokey Mo’s is an emerging fast-casual barbecue chain with 19 locations and counting in the state of Texas, and according to Craig, the brand is on a quest to be “the best neighborhood barbecue in Texas.”
According to Technomic, Smokey Mo’s grew sales by more than 10% in 2023 as the chain clocked nearly 6% unit growth, with more already coming in 2024.

This week on Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurant News, we’re sharing the first of many conversations we had with restaurant experts in Chicago at the National Restaurant Association Show this spring.
As always, the Show was widely attended by vendors, operators, and — luckily for all who now get to enjoy this conversation — social-media stars. 
Today, we’re sharing a chat between our editor-in-chief Sam Oches and Sam “the Cooking Guy” Zien. Sam the Cooking Guy attended his first-ever restaurant show to receive NRN’s MenuMasters Award for Digital Innovation, so he sat down to talk about why his intended travel channel never came to be, why he keeps his content simple and straightforward, and how he translated social media work to operating restaurants in San Diego’s Little Italy.
Enjoy the conversation, and keep coming back for more tidbits and insights from Chicago.

On this bonus episode of Extra Serving, a podcast from Nation’s Restaurant News, we’re sharing a conversation between senior editor Bret Thorn and CKE Restaurants chief marketing officer Jennifer Tate.
You may recall that back in April, we here at NRN published our annual Power List, highlighting 25 restaurant marketers who are creatively reaching guests leveraging the creator economy, and 25 social-media influencers creating innovative food content.
Tate was one of the marketers on that list. She and Thorn talked back in the spring, touching on the company’s free-burger Super Bowl campaign, brand separation between longtime twins Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, and, of course, influencer marketing.
Enjoy their conversation, and don’t forget to check out last week’s conversation between senior editor Ron Ruggless and Wendy’s global director of social media and digital engagement Kristin Tormey. We’ll be back on Friday with a regular episode of Extra Serving.