Ron Shaich

And by the early 90s, some consumers would wake up and say, I want it done the way my grandparents did it.

No chemicals, no preservatives, stone deck ovens.

And we began to say, there's a powerful opportunity in, shall we say, specialty food.

And there's no more powerful platform to compete with that than a specialty bakery.

And putting those two together became our manifestation of what we could do as now called fast casual concept.

And so again, same thing.

I saw it.

I could see it.

I could taste it.

And it was the opportunity to go put that in place.

We should come back to what the objective of all this is in a second.

But that led to that second transformation.

And the second transformation ultimately was to apply those principles of a specialty food to one of our concepts.

And I began to apply it to this one concept we held called St.

Louis Bread Company.

And we literally completely rebuilt it.

We took that unit that was doing about a million dollars a year.

It was basically a sandwich place in which the bread was the differentiator.

And we added a breakfast business, Rudin and Sourdough Bagels.

And the business popped from a million to a million, 250.