[Darin Detwiler] Welcome to Spoiler Alert! I'm Dr. Darin Detwiler.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] And we're in Chicago at the National Restaurant Association. And you know what's one thing you can find in Chicago, as easy as you can find in California and Los Angeles?
[Callin Godson-Green] Go on.
[Darin Detwiler] A Cheesecake Factory. And you know, when I think of Cheesecake Factory, you know what the first thing that comes to mind is?
[Callin Godson-Green] Go on.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, in addition to their small, short menu. It's Dr. Al Baroudi. Ladies and gentlemen, our special guest, Dr. Al Baroudi, welcome.
[Al Baroudi] Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Darin Detwiler. Nice to see you again. Although we are very close neighbors in California, but we never saw each other in there. We see each other on the planes.
[Darin Detwiler] On the planes. We've actually been on the same flight together. so many people, when they go to a strange city, they think, I'm going to go to restaurants. When they see Cheesecake Factory, they know they're going to get the flavors they want, the menu items they want, but also the experience that they want. Tell me a little bit about Cheesecake Factory. There may be someone out here there who does not know what Cheesecake Factory is. What is Cheesecake Factory? And what do you do with Cheesecake Factory?
[Al Baroudi] Very good. Well, I'm going to give you a little secret about Cheesecake Factory for the people who does not know anything about Cheesecake Factory. And for the people who does know something about Cheesecake Factory, I'm going to give you a little secret. We'll get to that into the discussion. I'm Vice President for Food Safety and Quality Assurance. I was invited to start the department for them 2008, 18 years ago. Since you mentioned the menu, I'll get to that. But the first things I said when I met with our CEO, Never met him. That was my first time during the final stage of the interview. I said, if this position being created by you, David Overton, the CEO and the founder of this company, because you wanted to protect your brain and your company and your guests, or it was pushed on you by stockholders, by legal, by anything as a lip service position to say that I do have a food safety executive on board. Because I have to put a little quotation here. This was back in 2008. 2008, the economy was what? Going south. Right? Company was closing down restaurant, closing down the stores and so on and so forth. For this company to initiate or to create a food safety position, a device present level has to do, has to be something.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah.
[Al Baroudi] That's why I ask a question. I said, if the answer is the first one, you won't protect your brain and your company, I can start tomorrow. But if the answer is the second portion of the questions, is a lip service position. I'm sorry, I'm going to tell you. I'm not interested, and I can save myself time and everybody else's time. I can't leave right now. What can he say? He jumped from his tea and said, it is me. I want to protect my company, my mom's company, my dad's company. Yeah, I said, okay, thank you very much. That's what I wanted. At that time, what I was talking about, I was speaking with everybody sitting in the room, in the boardroom, actually. I have the president, I have the other senior executive, you know, HR, the legal and operations COO. So they get the message. So I started the food safety culture. in the company before I put my put in the door.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah.
[Al Baroudi] I got the, what you call it, I'm looking for a world. I got the support on #1.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah.
[Al Baroudi] That goes all the way down. That's what started this whole thing. And then the next question came at me was from the president of the company, who's my boss. He said, Dr. Baroudi, if you get the job, what will you do? As soon as he said, if you get the job, the lady sitting next to him, the HR lady, starts laughing. Yeah. He looked at her and said, why are you laughing? Well, because I know what he's going to tell you. I asked him this question a couple of days ago. Okay, let's hear it. I said, knowing what I know, as little as possible, not as much as possible, as little as possible, because I'm still an outsider now. Just looking at the menu. that you have 20 plus pages, okay? And the items that's on that menu that range from snacks in a way, seafood to meat to chicken to salads to cakes and anything in between. And I said, you also claim to my knowledge that everything is made to order in every restaurant, every kitchen in every restaurant. It's not like made in central location and shipped and then heated up or microwaved to serve to the guests. It's made in each restaurant. So just knowing those two facts, it's telling me a lot of information and a lot of moving parts in that little kitchen that you have in the back. A lot of potential for cross contamination that can happen. that can create a problem. It's not if I get the job, when I get the job. So when I get the job, I will give myself six months assessment period. Now go out and visit as many restaurants as I can. Being in you, people not knowing me yet, I might have some freedom that none of you will have if you go to visit a restaurant. So I take my phone with me and I start taking pictures. So I evaluate and assess the situation. Then I'll come back after six months. And I call for a meeting with all of you and whoever you want to invite. And then I'll show you exactly what I discovered. And I will show you my roadmap. Five years roadmap and 10 years roadmap. Tell you what I will do. So that's what I will do when I got the job. I was at the time living in Henderson, Nevada. finished the interview, done everything, and get in my car with my wife, going back to Nevada. But an hour on the road to 10, I get a phone call. Dr. Baroni, can you come back to sign the contract? Of course.
[Darin Detwiler] Obviously, you've moved on from your six-month exploring, and you've been there for almost 18 years.
[Al Baroudi] 18 plus. 18 years plus.
[Darin Detwiler] 18 years plus.
[Callin Godson-Green] Just been over the six months, yeah.
[Darin Detwiler] Almost a year for every page of the menu. And I kid because it's good stuff. What has been some of the biggest on your journey here? some of the biggest insights or biggest changes you think that you've made.
[Al Baroudi] My biggest discovery that I noticed during my assessment period, the one denominator that I figured out right away, the leafy greens. So the salads, because as I said, everything is prepped to order in that kitchen, in that prep sense, we prep the salads, we prep the chicken, we prep the seafood, we prep the, you name it. Okay, they go through there. We cook the chicken, so we kill the salmonella, cook the meat, kill the E. coli. We cook on, but we do not cook the salads. Right. And how much salads do we serve? If you take a look in our guest room, okay, almost every table. Yeah. Not every guest had Salad, at least 90% of that. To me, this would make the risk value or factor goes very high.
[Darin Detwiler] What's that phrase? You don't cook your salad.
[Al Baroudi] You do not cook your salad, okay? You serve your salad fresh, okay? No kill step. So I need to figure out something that can do the job. I call it smart to proof, not idiot proof, smart to proof. Because the team member that was preparing all of this, they don't have time to think, what am I going to do? Am I doing it correctly? I want to come up with some kind of solutions that take all the guesswork off their mind. And even since we are doing very fast, fast, fast, take care of that situation. What was that? I introduced the Ozone technology. Ozone technology, it is not a new technology. It's been around for 100 years. We never had any accident, any one accident compared to chlorine and other things, gas or what have you. I said, I need to introduce this ozone technology to this kitchen as a killer step for the greenies. Sanitizing, yeah. I had little resistance at the beginning because it costs a lot. Because ozone cannot produce it somewhere and ship it. has to be produced on site because of the shelf life of the ozone. So I have to put a generator, ozone generator in every kitchen. I thought some little resistance because of the cause. But then I explained to them the consequences if not having.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah. The cost of the machine versus the cost of not having the machine.
[Al Baroudi] If you have one incident, it will pay 200 times over, but whatever cost is going to cost us to do this. And by the way, they agreed with me at one time, they said, okay, we will do it in certain size of the company, like second division. Oh yeah, One division, like 20, 30 restaurants.
[Callin Godson-Green] Testing per se.
[Al Baroudi] I said, no, either all or none. Why is that? I said, because if I have it in 20 or 50 restaurants and I don't have it in the rest, if God forbid something happened in the other restaurant.
[Callin Godson-Green] Doesn't matter.
[Al Baroudi] Yeah. And then I have to face Bill Marler on this deposition.
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah.
[Al Baroudi] Why you don't have this good technology that you said that it kill as a kill step in that restaurant where my client was and you have it in here. Just to save money.
[Darin Detwiler] Right. Because, and what's your phrase here?
[Al Baroudi] My phrase here is, if you are in the food business, then food safety is not negotiable. So food safety is #1. And also to me, food safety is not a function. It is a movement, I would say. So we have to grab food safety cultures and make it a habit everywhere, anytime. Every restaurant, every day. This way everybody will be happy. So that's what I was going to say. I told you, I'm going to tell you a secret later on. The secret is we have a ozone technology in every restaurant, meaning I will not eat salad or green, leafy green outside our restaurant and outside my home.
[Darin Detwiler] Wow.
[Al Baroudi] Just for the fact that I'm not so sure about the safety of that leafy green.
[Darin Detwiler] You have to have that confidence. And it's definitely an important part there. Dr. Alberuti, I want to thank you for joining us. You know, it's such an important message, the idea of what is and what's not negotiable. And you know, if your priorities are straight, then your investment will be there.
[Al Baroudi] It did pay off. It did pay off.
[Darin Detwiler] Right. I appreciate your thought on it too, in terms of if you're not going to pay for it now, what's the cost of not doing it down the road?
[Al Baroudi] Save me a little money now or pay me big time later on if this problem happens.
[Darin Detwiler] Exactly. Thank you very, very much.
[Al Baroudi] Thank you for having me.
[Darin Detwiler] Always good to see you.
[Al Baroudi] Thank you.
[Callin Godson-Green] Thank you, Doctor Al.
