[Darin Detwiler] Welcome to Spoiler Alert! I'm Dr. Darin Detwiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] And where are we?
[Callin Godson-Green] We're at NRA, the National Restaurant Association, 2026.
[Darin Detwiler] That's right. We're in Chicago, Illinois, amidst a big public concert with Bruno Mars and a marathon. And we're in the Tech Pavilion at the McCormick Place, huge facility. And there are so many sights and sounds and even smells. The food is incredible. But we're hoping that our conversation here is going to be incredible.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, absolutely.
[Darin Detwiler] And we are here with Jerry from Cafe Rio. And Jerry, tell us a little bit about yourself.
[Jerry Juneau] Sure. My name is Jerry Juneau. I'm with Cafe Rio, regional brand out West. We have 152 restaurants in 10 states. I'm the director of training and food safety. And I came in as a corporate trainer and really absorbed food safety as part of my role over the last 15 years. For about the last 10, it's been the majority of my job.
[Darin Detwiler] Such a capacity where multiple levels of pressure and change. And you talked, we were talking before we started recording that you have multiple locations in California and other states. How many states?
[Jerry Juneau] Ten states.
[Darin Detwiler] Ten states. That in itself creates a challenge in that not every state has the same regulation.
[Jerry Juneau] They're all different, right? I mean, there's a national food code or a model food code. Each state adopts it a little differently. So we have to be aware of that. And also food safety is more challenging the larger your growth. You know, the complexity and all these different restaurants doing the same thing the same way, or they're supposed to do it anyway, becomes very difficult to achieve. You know, and so when I started at Cafe Rio, you know, we only had about 50 restaurants. And so we've grown by 100 since then. And we did everything on paper, which is what most restaurants did 10 years ago. You had a log book and you recorded everything. And then, your ability to do the same thing the same way in all the restaurants is almost based upon pinky swears, right? They promise you they're going to do it a certain way, but you don't have any way of checking to make sure that happened.
[Callin Godson-Green] How do you know until you're in the doors?
[Jerry Juneau] That's right. And so, you know, that kind of challenge was crazy. And at my company, when we were smaller, they were really kind of content with that being the way we did things, right? People wrote it down, but it alarmed me because I saw as we grew, unless we became more sophisticated in how we managed our food safety programs. that's a recipe for disaster. And so what I did was I went to our leadership team and asked if I could do an analysis of our logs, hauled them all into the office. We spent about 30 days looking, taking a look at all the logs and measuring the level of compliance. And we ended up with, and I've told the story 100 times, right, 41% compliance. So 59% of our logs, whether blank or not filled out correctly. And that was the leverage I used actually to come to this very show 10 years ago, because I was looking for a cloud-based logging system where I could, look at what people were doing every day in the restaurants by going on a dashboard. And could I talk about that for just a moment? Please, So, you know, when you want to create change in restaurants, when you want to behavior in restaurants, and I don't know anything about other businesses. It's all been restaurants for me for 50 years.
[Callin Godson-Green] That's all that matters.
[Jerry Juneau] Don't worry. In restaurants, right, if you want something to do something a certain way, you have to create a standard. That means it has to be in writing so you can duplicate it. So you can put the same duplicated standard in all the restaurants. Then you have to have a way to measure it. And then you have to have a way to audit it. And ultimately, you probably should have a way to dissent it. So unless you do those four things, nothing ever really changes. So what I wanted to do was create a system where everything was in writing, I could measure it because I could run a report that shows the level of compliance. And then I actually added it to our private audited services. So the restaurants are measured and evaluated at least five times a year on how well they log as one of their critical standards. And then we incent them on that. They achieve bonuses based upon their levels of achievement.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, it's crazy when you look at what you're talking about and the first thing that I would imagine people think about is that if I go to your restaurant in Lake Forest, California, and then I go to your restaurant in Salt Lake City, I want to have the same menu, the same experience, the same service, but I also want the same food safety standards.
[Jerry Juneau] That's absolutely true. I will tell you though that I don't think customers think a lot about that. They put their safety in our hands, right? They go to our, they assume that the restaurant that they're eating at is taking the proper care with their food so that when they get it, they're going to think about the flavor, they're going to think about the speed of service, the hospitality, but they're not going to think about food safety unless something happens. And so, but I take it seriously. Every single thing that we do in the restaurants is about protecting the food from the time the ingredient comes to the restaurant, telecom goes to a customer. That involves procedural things, that involves cleanliness and involves taking the temperatures appropriate. It means wholly holding things a certain amount of time. And the managers have to be trained and certified to be able to spot a problem when it exists. So what Jolt now SmartSense does is it helps me with the audit and measurement piece, right? I'm able to go on a dashboard and type in a restaurant and look and see whether or not they're logging correctly, whether or not they're using the right equipment. right? Whether they're doing it on time, and I run reports regularly and I give the restaurants feedback on that. it's been great. So that's really how my relationship with Jolt started, right? I wanted a place where I could go and look at, the time, 60 restaurants, go in their dashboard, pull it up and see how everybody was doing at any time I wanted it. But the cool thing is that it's grown. You know, we started with a cloud-based logging system, which is basically just lists and temperatures. and commands that people have to do on a scheduled list at a certain time. But it's grown. We now use SmartSense Jolt to monitor the ambient air of all of our walk-in temperatures, right? That didn't exist when I started with Jolt, right? That was something they came to me later and said, you know, is this a product that you'd like to consider? Touchdown, man, because the way I monitored ambient air temperature in the walk-ins is we used a little manual. They called it a data logger. They had to stick it in a computer every day. They had to run a report, right? And that was part of my audit, right? And those didn't happen right either, all the time. And so now I can I can snap my fingers and look at any walk-in temperature that I want in all of my 152 restaurants, and I get alerts if there's any problems. It's pretty cool. But that wasn't even why I came to Joel. It's something that I did afterwards. And then Joel came to me with another product and said, would you like us to do label print? Right? And now I print thousands of labels every week in all of my restaurants. on demand instantly, right? It's changed the game for me. and I can control that system from the same dashboard that I control everything else. It allows me to see what's happening. It allows me to make corrections when it's not. It allows me to incent people on those behaviors, you know, and, you know, health departments, you know, they evaluate restaurants on risk. They lowered the risk levels in my restaurants because they saw the things they were doing. It was a, you know, an incredible advancement for how we do things. That was really how we transformed how we control food safety.
[Darin Detwiler] What sounds like 1 critical piece of this transformation though is speed. All the things you're talking about, you're able to get it so much faster or to achieve those things so much faster.
[Jerry Juneau] Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to just use one example, I'll use the label printing as an example, right? So prior to this, people manually wrote out labels and placed them on Prodimus, right? 10, 15 seconds a label, right? hundreds a day, right? Had to be, a lot of our product is controlled by time and not temperature. So every four hours, all the products have to get new labels. We added it up. We were spending, depending on the business of the store, between 2:00 and 4:00 hours a day just writing labels. So when we instituted the label system, which is by far from the restaurant standpoint, the most popular part.
[Callin Godson-Green] Of this program, right?
[Jerry Juneau] We had two or three more hours at least to be able to redeploy to other things. We didn't cut the labor. We put it on cleanliness. We put it on customer service.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, guests facing roles even, you know.
[Jerry Juneau] And so if I have a label printer that's down for repair, right? And Jolt SmartSense is pretty good about supporting these things. So it's not down very long, right? It's like the world has ended. I get calls every day. on when we're going to get this thing fixed. It's usually only a couple of days. Nobody wants to go back to manually run out labels.
[Callin Godson-Green] An integral part of the business. They're like, how do I do my job?
[Jerry Juneau] This GPS program is incredible. I, you know, just incredible.
[Darin Detwiler] Sure. Let me come back to culture though. You know, we had an experience about a year ago. We were talking with someone about how they were hiring very young employees and older employees. And the expectations around technology with the younger employees were X and the older employees were nowhere in the vicinity.
[Jerry Juneau] That's a very common problem.
[Darin Detwiler] I would imagine that with technology that you're talking about, even with the speed, are you aligning with some of those expectations not only of your customers, but also of your workforce?
[Jerry Juneau] So it's a very real thing that the older employees have a more difficult time with technology, POS systems, computer stuff. If we hire a manager who's going to interface with the back of the house computer system, a lot of times they're very leery about learning those skills because they've never used it in the past. You don't really need that with this stuff, right? I mean, you open up an iPad, which anybody can use, right? And it takes 30 seconds to train. and they open up a list and they stick a thermometer in a product and it automatically imports the temperature. It's literally 5 seconds of work, right? So the training is about how to keep the probe safe by making sure it's sanitary, how often those temperatures have to be taken, you know, but there hasn't really been a barrier with technology. And stuff like the sensors and the walk-ins and the JPS printer, I handle all that. You know, and it's not a lot. It's not a lot. If a sensor's down, I send them a note, replace the battery. If there's a problem with the printer. I can talk to them or resetting it or whatever it is to take care of. It hasn't really been a barrier. We have a much more barrier. We have many more barriers with a computer. I have general managers who ask their assistants to do computer work for them just because they're uncomfortable getting in there. So that hasn't really been a problem. And again, you mentioned speed. The speed of this stuff is if a restaurant hasn't taken the proper temperatures at the proper time, it's not because they don't have the time to do it. It's because they chose not to do it. And we can fix that. We can fix that easily.
[Darin Detwiler] Great point. Great point. So do you see technology everything we've been talking about in terms of technology, do you see that as a critical ingredient in terms of further expansion of not only Cafe Rio, but any company?
[Jerry Juneau] It really is. I mean, the more restaurants we have, the more complex it is to make sure that everything is working the way it should. Food safety systems are the same in all the restaurants, right? We may have some different minor standards, you know, like, you know, in one state, they might require a different hot water temperature than the other states. And so what do we do? We just make sure that the standard is the same and all of them at the higher standard so that they're all the same, right? Some states might have a different holding temperature on the line, right? So, we do one-offs to make sure that the systems reflect that. But the great thing about technology today is that if I open a new restaurant, for example, I'm opening a new one in St. George in July, right? They will have all of my monitoring systems installed, right? I will have all of the programming complete for the people that are in the system that would be held accountable to those long before they ever open that restaurant. And everybody is already aware of those systems. So there's really no, there's no problem there. I cannot imagine going back to a paper-based system where I was dependent on a human being looking at it to make sure it's filled out correctly. It just wouldn't work in today's work. And I will tell you that the expectations by the food code every year gets tighter as well. Right? I mean, 10 years ago, there were, many different things in the food code that are just much tighter.
[Darin Detwiler] Right.
[Jerry Juneau] Can I talk about one other piece of complexity I'd like to talk about? Do we have time?
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, we got all the time in the world.
[Jerry Juneau] So one of the exciting things that I used Jolt now SmartSense for, so we moved about four years ago, we moved a lot of our products into a central kitchen. You know, the meats and some of the sauces and, you know, the central kitchen, if you produce meat and ship it, has to be USDA certified. That was brand new to us, because we've never been a vendor of products before. And so I was challenged with creating HASA plans and creating monitoring systems and logging systems that would be at the level that the USDA requires, which is completely different in terms of complexity and intensity than restaurants. And so my first thought was, to ask the USDA who I should use to create those systems. They said, use anybody you want. That didn't help me. Not at all.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, unfortunately, both the USDA and the FDA, they'll say, we like technology, but we won't tell you.
[Jerry Juneau] That's exactly what it was. It gave me nothing. So I called my friends at Jolt and what they told me was that they had not done a USDA kitchen before, but they thought they could. And so they, I was on the phone and in person with them on site multiple times during the period of time, the three or four months that we had to get ready for our grant of certification. Right. And they use the existing systems, which are even better now, right, to create a system that monitors everything we need, gives access to the USDA auditors, the things that we want them to see. right? They understand how to use the reporting because it's very easy, right? And they told me that we were the best prepared new startup for a USDA that they'd ever seen. You know, whether they just said that to smoke beat, I don't know, but I took it as a, and they've told me that multiple times since that, you know, because I was convinced at one point, you know, how are we going to get through this? It was quite intense, you know, but they, you know, I basically when they came in and I presented our system I presented Jolt, is what I did. And I took them through all our reporting, everything we measured, how we'd run reports, and what we looked at. And they were absolutely delighted by it. And so when I've talked to my friends at Jolt, I think there's an opportunity there for business, right? Because there's thousands of USDA operations all over, and they don't use Jolt, right? It was quite fun, right? And what I learned from building those systems for the central kitchen, I've taken some of those learnings and put them back into how I monitor the stuff in my regular service.
[Darin Detwiler] Now, you have helped many facilities adopt new technologies. And here he's talking about when there's new locations and they're starting with the technology embedded into it. Does that excite you to think of a place that from ground up, from day one, you already have the technology embedded within the system?
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah, and I think, Jerry, even to your point about the age not being really an issue or the aversion to technology, I think because it's ingrained now in the business, if we have, and we do work with customers that have never had technology and introducing it. Like it's the change management. That's what like you brought up. Whereas now you guys are nearly 10 years into having tech. So now it's just part of it. It's like, good morning, like welcome to your first day. This is what we do. It's not like we're going to try this, the like, you know, the kind of uncertainty. It's just part of it and that's there. And like the I think from your perspective, like you started with a problem of not having visibility unless you were on the ground, boots on the ground, which is impossible. It's fine when you have 5 restaurants that are all within 30 mile radius as you grow and everyone wants to grow. That's the thing. Like no one starts a business with the hope of having one location and never moving. That is the issue or the problem you had that you began with. And now like you're solving other problems that never became problems because you have the solution there. I think the USDA certification is a big one, and I actually ran into that as well in my past life. We grew too big, not too big, we grew big, so we made it. We needed a commissary, brilliant, easy, happy days, head of food safety, no problem. I do all these restaurants, work with the health department, and then you find out you're like, no, you're not going to health inspector in here now. USDA is involved, and then they're like, oh, also, but you have food products that aren't meat, so FDA probably needs to certify the other half of the business, and it's a completely different ball game. Having one system even in place, obviously there's different, your CCPs are different in different locations, but having one system where you can house all of that and you understand how it works, they understand how it works, that I would say made your life exponentially easier than needing to, we could introduce some specific software for your USDA certification, but how does that help you? And.
[Jerry Juneau] Never, ever. assume change management will be easier. It is not easy. I mean, even going from paper to electronics, right? You know, why are we doing this? It's different. Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? My life is ending, right? Duplicate it, right? Document it, duplicate it, measure it, monitor it, and incent it. You know, and over time, that moves people. You know, just assuming they're going to do it never works.
[Darin Detwiler] The conversations I would imagine that this initiates, do you have different conversations with this technology in terms of recall simulations, even like different conversations with your insurance company? Hey, we have this technology. It's not just us insuring this technology, but look at how we're using this technology to better protect the safety of our product and our service. Lower our risk.
[Jerry Juneau] By lowering our risk in our restaurants, right, that was a big deal for us because we, the health departments are showing us that they are more confident in what we do. In terms of liability, right, in terms of liability, what they care about is that we have a system. You know, we haven't seen any reduction in our rates due to, you know, but we would not be able to be insured if we did not have a system, right? The USDA requires that we do mock recalls, right, that we are able to because we're a vendor. If we have a problem with the product, who do we notify? How do we get it back? How do we ensure it does not go into commerce? And commerce is our own restaurants. I mean, we're our own vendor, but so it's a little different, but you know, we have to be able to do all those things and or else we can't be insured. You know, I mean, that's the bottom line. You know, I believe that all this has made us the safest restaurants in the business, right? I mean, we're really on top of this stuff, but you have to have a system that you can duplicate, measure, monitor, and incent, and it really is working well. I'm really happy with that part of the show.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, and both the awesome element and strangely enough, the tragic element is that all this value-add is so that your customer can rest with those assumptions in terms of what they're never going to think about.
[Jerry Juneau] They're never going to think about it unless I have a problem, which I never have, right? Unless I have a problem, my customers are not going to worry about it. They're just going to assume that everything's okay. And that's the way I want it. I want us to worry about something. The last thing a customer needs to do is walk into a restaurant and wonder if their fruit is safe. You totally want them to come into their head. What you want them to know is appreciate the value, the flavor, the experience in the restaurant, and we work this other stuff behind the scenes.
[Darin Detwiler] It's sad to say that as much as someone would say, oh, no one's going to walk into a restaurant and be like, no, there's a red flag. I'm going to walk out. It happens to me. There are things that I sign. I'm sure we've all been there where it's like.
[Jerry Juneau] There are some that.
[Callin Godson-Green] You would choose over even to walk into because there's some that you'd be like you'd walk right by the doors of whereas you can walk into somewhere and then maybe decide not to because obviously all of us being in food safety but even walking in the door means that you have a respect for that brand and trust it so.
[Jerry Juneau] And the nightmare is right you have a problem in one restaurant but I have 151 other restaurants potentially affected by it you know the damage you know you can't and it takes forever to get.
[Darin Detwiler] Exactly. Jerry Juno, Cafe Rio, Mexican Grill. I'm excited. I'm going to make an effort to revisit your restaurant. There's one not too far from where I live. And I'll let you know.
[Jerry Juneau] Sweet pork burrito, hot sauce, sour cream. Do it. Just send me a check in the mail, man. Thanks very much.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you very much.
[Callin Godson-Green] Thank you.
