Jennifer Dodd took over Main Squeeze Juice Co in 2024 walking into a brand where franchisee trust had been obliterated. Four months later sales were up 35%, and they held it for over a year without a single base price increase. She walks Andy through how she rebuilt that trust, the demographic patterns she has been reading since 2007, and why she believes the competition restaurant operators should fear is the convenience store down the road.

In this episode:

• (01:02) The red mop wig outside a Wendy's at 15, and the microbiology student who already understood why food changes people

• (08:16) Taking over a brand with fractured franchisee trust, and what she actually did in the first 30 days

• (12:18) Why she paid for the digital menu boards and the installation herself, and asked franchisees for nothing but the space

• (16:58) A 35% sales lift in four months, sustained for over a year, with no increase to base prices

• (18:19) Why a thirty-store brand runs its own production, inventory, and loyalty software in house

• (23:36) The 2007 statistic about working mothers that told her the modern restaurant industry had already been built

• (27:29) How that same pattern-reading led her to call functional wellness years before it exploded

• (30:15) Why she thinks convenience stores, with the best real estate in the country, are the threat operators are not watching

• (33:44) The trend she says will age badly, and the D-Day weather story she uses to explain what AI cannot see

• (42:15) Her closing advice for future leaders, starting with a Theodore Roosevelt line about how mediocrity actually happens

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Joseph Szala has publicly graded three restaurant rebrands. Domino's worked. Long John Silver's worked. Cracker Barrel did not. His read is that the logos had almost nothing to do with any of it. Cracker Barrel sterilized the interiors, lost the rocking chairs and the old man on the sign, then let a rebrand take the blame for a shift that was already underway. Domino's ran an ad where the CEO admitted the pizza was bad and promised to fix it, and bought itself years of goodwill in the process.

This week, Andy sits down with Joseph Szala, who has spent almost twenty years pointed at restaurants, most of it talking operators out of the thing they came to buy. He founded the branding agency Vigor in 2003, narrowed it to restaurants only, and sold it in 2021 after eighteen years. Today he is Partner and VP at 3Owl, which builds websites and digital ordering for around fifty multi-unit brands, and he runs his own branding studio, Bullhearted. He has written five books, including Mass Behaving on brand archetypes, now in its second edition, and Quiet Killers, which he says is the reason he wanted to come on this show.

He sits on the brand side and the commerce side of the same problem, which means he has watched brands buy a rebrand to avoid fixing the kitchen and buy a platform to avoid fixing the org chart. His answer to the question every struggling operator eventually asks, is a rebrand going to fix this, is the most useful thing in this conversation.

In this episode:

• What losing the rights to his old blog in the Vigor sale taught him about which parts of a brand are worth fighting for

• Why a rebrand is almost never the fix for a failing brand, and what actually is

• Cracker Barrel vs. Domino's vs. Long John Silver: what separated the rebrand that backfired from the ones that worked

• "Slop is human": what AI-generated content reveals about the quality control we were already skipping

• The math he ran on the AI-designed barbershop flyer everyone was mad about

• Who should own brand voice when the order-taker is a language model

• Survivorship bias, siloed teams, and why he would put "tech" at the end of every C-title

• Why the digital guest experience is the most important thing a restaurant brand sells, and still gets treated like a brochure website

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:41 The name he did not mean to let go of

04:41 Why he now thinks the name sucked

05:58 Is a rebrand ever the actual fix?

06:56 What is usually wrong instead

08:37 Branding is shared by everyone in the organization

09:12 Three rebrands, and what separated them

10:40 What Domino's got right

12:39 Cracker Barrel, the interiors, and the rocking chairs

14:29 Survivorship bias and the copycat problem

16:17 Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM

17:57 How restaurant tech stacks actually get chosen

18:55 What happens when leaders take the vendor's number at face value

21:59 Buying tech that scales with the next 25 units

23:48 AI as an accelerator, not a solution

27:34 The barbershop flyer math

29:38 Where he will not let AI near the numbers

35:51 When your order-taker is a language model

39:59 What to audit first

45:59 Why he would put tech at the end of every C-title

47:07 The digital guest experience, and the lift brands leave on the table

Suzie Tsai runs one of the fastest-growing Korean fried chicken brands in America, and most days her job is saying no. Bonchon's CEO walks Andy through the filter she runs every decision through, from franchise deals to vendor pitches, and why patience beats urgency almost every time.

In this episode:

(03:52) Why her first official act as CEO was restoring two Korean characters to the Bonchon logo

(14:03) Why she came up through consumer insights instead of ops or finance

(15:59) What a thousand hours of listening to guests reveals that operators consistently get wrong

(24:37) The decision filter she applies to franchise candidates whose financials are flawless but whose answer to "why Bonchon?" is only about the economics

(27:42) Deals she personally signed off on and now questions ("who approved this?" It was her)

(33:41) Why the fastest way to lose her in a pitch meeting is leading with technology instead of the problem

(34:07) Her blunt verdict on most vendor pitches: restaurants don't need more technology, they need fewer friction points

(46:08) How "main and main" real estate, not Asian trade districts, became Bonchon's growth playbook in small-town America

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

A guest ordered mac and cheese from California Pizza Kitchen, got a container of cheese sauce with no noodles, and posted it to TikTok. Within days it was everywhere. CPK's answer wasn't a statement from corporate it was their head of culinary, mid-photo-shoot and openly annoyed, being handed an iPhone and told to film a deadpan training video teaching his own cooks how to make it right. The punchline: because one guest got half a mac and cheese, everyone got half off mac and cheese. The video passed 12 million views and over a million likes, and doubled the brand's social following.

Paul Pszybylski is the man in that video, and only the third person ever to run culinary at CPK in 41 years. He came to it sideways dropping out of college for a line cook job in the French Quarter, Le Cordon Bleu, pastry under Wolfgang Puck at Spago Chicago for $8 an hour, then a decade in Kraft's Glenview test kitchen developing everything from salad dressings to Oreos to the CPK frozen pizzas he'd eventually inherit from the other side of the table. In 2006 he served as a United Nations ambassador teaching Western culinary skills at a nonprofit school north of Hanoi.

Today he's the rare culinary leader designing one idea to flex across sit-down restaurants, airports, international franchises, and a frozen business with Nestlé worth north of $230 million CPK now sells more frozen pizzas than restaurant pizzas, and its top frozen market is Charlotte, North Carolina. He sits between marketing and operations and speaks both languages, which is exactly why his story about betting the company on hand-stretching every pizza is the most useful thing in this episode.

In this episode:

The mac and cheese TikTok, the deadpan training video, and what "run toward it" actually looks like in real time

Why telling Rick and Larry "no" almost cost Paul the job and the reframe that saved it

Scrapping a 30-year dough press to hand-stretch every pizza: marketing said "let's go," ops said "we'll never keep up"

The West Coast Burger and the crispy chicken sandwich: what happens when a dish is too good for the kitchen it lives in

How to design one flavor idea for a hearth oven, a frozen line, and a franchisee in India

Why ops buy-in comes before creative ambition, every time

Say hi to everyone from the dishwasher to the GM the Rick and Larry habit Paul still practices 16 years later

His honest advice to young cooks: "You gotta be a little nuts"

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Most of the restaurant industry sells self-ordering kiosks on one number: labor saved. Brandon Barton thinks that's exactly the wrong pitch. As CEO of Bite, whose software runs kiosks for Portillo's, Chopt, Krispy Kreme, Big Chicken, and Arby's inside Love's Travel Stops… he argues that a screen isn't a cost cut. It's a hospitality channel, and it can out-serve a slammed cashier on a Friday night.

Brandon earned what he calls his "masters degree in Enlightened Hospitality" running beverage at Danny Meyer's Tabla, then carried that education into tech at Avero, as the first non-tech hire at Resy, and now at Bite. In this conversation with Andy, he makes the skeptic's case for digital hospitality and gets specific about what separates a kiosk guests love from one they tolerate.

This one is for operators: the reasoning is practical, the takes are honest (including which vendors are "lying" about their numbers), and the playbook is usable Monday morning.

Highlights:

Why "telling someone your order" was never the hospitality and where the human should go instead

How to design for "graceful failure" so a screen can apologize like your best server

The one question to ask Shake Shack's team before betting your career on a category

What Danny Meyer drills into you that no management book can teach

How to read the next AI pitch and spot the vaporware behind the 20% check-lift claim

The three fixes for a five-location operator whose kiosks feel cold

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for practical conversations with the people reshaping how restaurants run. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop regularly. Hit follow so you don't miss one.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Christopher Sebes has already been handed the restaurant industry's lifetime achievement award. Most people take that as a cue to slow down. At 72, he started his third career instead.

On this episode of Restaurant Reset, host Andy Grindstaff sits across the mic from the man who hired him a decade ago, the founder who built the platform Andy now runs. What follows is part career retrospective, part masterclass: how Sebes went from managing five-star hotels in Africa to building restaurant tech's first Windows point of sale, carried a company through Chapter 11 without his team ever feeling the panic, and beat far bigger competitors with a single rule.

Underneath the war stories, it's a conversation about the one thing that compounds over 50 years in business: trust. And why, in a low-margin, high-churn industry, it may be the only moat that lasts.

In this episode:

Why Sebes started a brand-new AI company at 72, and how he decides what's worth learning next

The $20,000-a-day math that kept his company alive through bankruptcy

The one rule that beat Micros and Aloha: "always do what you promise"

How to project calm as a leader when the business is quietly on fire

The only question restaurant operators should ask about any AI tool

What really happens to your product after an acquisition

His advice to anyone stuck in a job they can't stand

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the people shaping the future of hospitality.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Loyalty used to be a competitive edge for restaurants. Now it's table stakes, and the question executives are asking has flipped from "how do we launch a program" to "how do we prove this thing makes money." The uncomfortable answer, according to loyalty expert Olga Lopategui, is that most of them can't.

Olga is the founder of Restaurant Loyalty Specialists and a former Moscow oil-and-gas lawyer who spent 15 years inside the marketing machines at Pizza Hut, KFC, and TGI Fridays before building her own firm. This year she sat down with more than 50 senior loyalty leaders at America's biggest chains for her "Restaurant Loyalty Frontier" report.

What she found is the cleanest Restaurant Reset story there is: vendors advertising 15% lifts that shrink to 4% under real math, "personalization" that's mostly batch-and-blast, and programs running untouched for a year while nobody checks if they work.

In this episode:

Why a lawyer's skepticism makes her distrust every vendor ROI number

How to spot a loyalty program that's quietly failing in week one

The real reason 3 of 4 brands still send everyone the same email

What "set it and forget it" actually costs a restaurant over a year

Why 80% of your guests are anonymous, and why the app won't fix it

Where AI genuinely helps a loyalty team, and where it burns your database

The one number a small operator with no analyst should track this quarter

If you run a restaurant, lead marketing, or own a loyalty program you can't quite prove works, this one's for you.

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for new episodes every week.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

In 1985, two of the most successful trial lawyers in Los Angeles walked away from the law, mortgaged their homes, and opened a pizza restaurant on the quiet side of Beverly Drive. Their fancy menu bombed almost instantly. The chef they hired from Spago lasted a month. And then a barbecue chicken pizza turned California Pizza Kitchen into one of the most influential restaurant brands in American history.

Rick Rosenfield co-founded CPK with Larry Flax and ran it through every ownership structure a restaurant company can have: a PepsiCo "blank check" that nearly broke it, a founder-led buyback, a Nasdaq IPO, a boardroom showdown he triggered himself, and a $470 million sale. On this episode of Restaurant Reset, he sits down with Andy to mine that 40-year arc for the lessons today's operators actually need.

This is the conversation behind his forthcoming memoir, and it goes places his other interviews never have: the month CPK almost died, what a capital partner reliably misunderstands, and why culture, not product, is the only thing that ever lasts.

In this episode:

Why the high-concept menu failed and a single pizza became the #1 seller worldwide for 40 years

The night the founders cried in the back office, and how they rebuilt with no chef

How PepsiCo's "blank check" turned into the worst period of Rick's career

The store-by-store numbers that exposed a problem the whole board had missed

Why CPK refused to franchise domestically for 25 years

The ROCK values, and the people playbook that still works in 2026

Rick's honest verdict on the second-act concepts that didn't survive

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset for conversations with the operators and executives actually running the restaurant business. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Everyone in restaurant tech is racing toward AI ordering and automation. The customer data tells a different story. Only 9% of consumers say they'd rather order from an AI voice than a person, and the number one frustration is still the same one it's always been: the order being wrong.

In this solo episode, Andy Grindstaff walks through a Global Payments consumer survey on how people actually want to order, pay, and wait in 2026. Andy has spent his career at the intersection of restaurants and the technology that runs them, and he reads the data the way an operator would, with no vendor spin. The throughline is simple: get the fundamentals reliable before you layer anything clever on top.

From the drive-thru line length where customers give up, to why a quarter of your customers still aren't using your app, to the loyalty math hiding inside a fast experience, this one is a useful gut check for anyone investing in restaurant tech right now.

Highlights:

Why only 9% of consumers prefer AI ordering, and the one condition that makes people comfortable with automation

How a failed AI order becomes a "double failure" that costs more than the manual process

Why 1 in 4 customers aren't using restaurant apps, including the younger ones you'd assume are

The drive-thru threshold where most people leave, and why a fast visit today buys patience tomorrow

Why order accuracy still beats every shiny new feature on the roadmap

What 40% of consumers are doing differently because of rising prices

New episodes of Restaurant Reset every week. Follow on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.

Mike DeJong ran 5 Nothing Bundt Cakes bakeries at the same time. From the outside, it looked like a growing empire. From the inside, he was working more hours, opening more locations, and somehow making less money. He calls it the operator trap, and he's blunt about how it closed on him: he had built a job, not a business.

The wake-up call came on a tarmac in Mexico. His manager quit by phone. His phone was blowing up. And the realization that hit him wasn't about the manager… it was that he'd turned his phone on in the first place.

Mike walks Andy through the full sequence: what the trap actually feels like before you recognize it, the moment he found himself 60 days from bankruptcy on a location he thought had gone passive, and the specific steps he took to turn it around: including the hire that eventually let him run a bakery outside Seattle while living in Mexico.

In this episode:

How Mike went from burning out at five locations to building two more without being on-site

The 60-day bankruptcy near-miss: what metrics he stopped watching and why

The three operator types (Architect, Hunter, GSD) and the order of hires that follows

Why 75% of his staff quit during the turnaround and why he called it an opportunity

The one metric he watched daily: sales per labor hour

The mindset shift that changed everything: facts vs. stories

Subscribe to Restaurant Reset on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes every week for operators who want to run a better business.

Restaurant Reset is brought to you by Genius™ (Link globalpayments.com/genius) from Global Payments, the restaurant point of sale system that can power orders, payments and services in any type of food and beverage setting.