Ron Shaich

But Kava was doing higher volumes and was a better concept.

I started to think to myself, you know what?

What I should do is buy Zoe's.

And it was a $300 or $400 million public company at that point from a billion dollars.

You know, instead of figuring out for them, buy it and then merge it in with Kava.

And the one problem is I had to tell that to Kava, who wanted me to join their board.

And I broke the news to Brett Schulman, who is this wonderful CEO down at Kava.

And Brett said, wow, okay, that's an interesting idea.

And he said, before you join the board, maybe you want to tell them about this.

And I went and basically pitched their board on this idea.

And in their wisdom, I must be straight, they understood it.

And they understood the power of building a dominant brand in the Mediterranean category.

And it helped that I agreed to essentially finance a large part of the acquisition.

and to help lead it.

But what it amounted to was instead of me buying Zoe's, we decided to have Kava buy Zoe's, and then we would help them make that transformation.

And here was the bet, that by buying a company five times larger, we could apply our discipline, our skills, our culinary skills to end up with the dominant player in this category.

And

And the thesis – step back – but the thesis behind Act III is we bet on categories that have tailwinds, and then we endeavor to build the dominant player in that category.

My industry is an industry of winner-take-all.

Think McDonald's and Burger King.