MAISIE GANZLER

>> Craig Gould: Maisie Ganzler, thank you so much for joining me today. Maisie you are the former chief strategy and brand officer at bon Appetit Management Company. You spent, I believe, like, 30 years there growing it from $30 million to almost $2 billion company. And you have just recently written a book called you Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime and Other Lessons from the Food Industry for creating a more Sustainable company. The conversation, I think, is very interesting because you can look, at these lessons through a lens a lot of different ways for a corporate leader. But with my guests, I usually like to start with a really simple question, which is, can you tell me about your first job? What was that? Because a lot of times our first jobs are sort of telling about who we are, and our past kind of informs our future. So what was your first job?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, my very first job was actually cleaning the office where my mother worked on the weekends. When I was about 12, a friend and I would go on the weekends and vacuum and take out the garbage and clean the bathrooms and things like that. but my first official job was at, ah, Scontriano’s Dolphin Restaurant at the end of the Santa Cruz wharf, because I knew even then that I wanted to go into the hospitality industry. So I was 14 at that point, and I worked in the kitchen as a salad girl because it was a different time. And it was okay, apparently, for them to have a rule that only blondes were allowed front of house. Part of the beach vibe they wanted to create in Santa Cruz. So me and my brown hair were in the kitchen.

>> Craig Gould: Oh, my gosh that is such a telling story about the time. And, I’m sorry, were you tempted to become a front of the house blonde?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, I was never tempted to dye my hair. But the people that were front of the house got tips and you made a whole lot more money.

>> Craig Gould: let me ask you this. If you were sitting down next to somebody who had no, idea of who you are or what your career consisted of, and you mentioned your book, how do you start to explain to someone what the book consists of?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, the book is a, practical how to guide about creating a business strategy based on something that’s values based. And in my case, in my career, it was in the food industry and around sustainability. But the book’s written in five lessons that should be applicable across industry and across whatever values based idea you have. Again, mine was environmental and social sustainability. Yours might be around dei, around wellness. There’s different types of values that you might want to have your business focus on. And I think that people often misbelieve that if a company will just spend more money, pay more for things, pay more to their employees, that they will be more sustainable or that they will have more values baked into how they do business. And as it turns out, as I Learned from my 30 years at Bon Appetit Management Company, it’s much more complicated than that. And that’s the root of the book, to walk people through the process of taking science, taking different ideas about how they want to change the world, and translating those into effective business initiatives that gain you market share.

Bon Appetit Management Company is an on site restaurant company

>> Craig Gould: Maybe we can give people a little bit of background about Bon Appetit because I feel like it’s a company that I’m going to guess that, most of us have interacted with, but, but we never realized it.

>> Maisie Ganzler: Exactly.

>> Craig Gould: Could you kind of give a background on. You know what I mean by that?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Yeah. So Bon Appetit Management Company is an on site restaurant company, otherwise known as a food service company. So we ran cafes for corporations, private colleges, museums and other cultural centers, always attached to a client and often not with the Bon Appetit name anywhere. So that’s when you get at the people have interacted with us, maybe at their college, maybe going to a Warriors game in San Francisco, maybe at work at Google or Oracle or at Amazon or, or a museum or a museum, maybe at the Getty center in Los Angeles. And they thought they were just having great food put out by the institution or by provided by their employer. But somebody has to run that. Somebody has to employ the chefs and the Servers and create the menus, order the food and all of that. And that’s what Bon Appetit management company does. So at, Bon Appetit, we always, from the founding, had the market differentiator of great tasting food. And that might sound like whatever a restaurant company wants to have great tasting food, but in the institutional market, great taste was not at the forefront. If people went to college in the 70s or 80s or ate in a corporate cafeteria, as our founder and CEO, Fidel Baccio, always said, it was mystery meat. It was, bland, overcooked vegetables with no seasoning. And so he had the unique idea of putting a real executive chef cooking from scratch into this institutional marketplace that hadn’t seen great food. So that’s where the company started. That was the initial spark of inspiration for it. As time went on, we had what we called internally a crisis of flavor on the plate. Food didn’t taste the way food used to taste, if that makes any sense. if you grew up in an area like New Jersey or California that had farming, it used to be able to take a tomato and bite into it like an apple, and it would burst with juice and flavor. And sometime along the way, we realized tomatoes became round and kind of red, but hard and mealy and not flavorful. And as a company that staked our business on great tasting food and didn’t want to use excess salt, fat, sugar to cover up the flavor of food, we needed good ingredients. And that’s what led us on this path that eventually became the idea of sustainability. It started with the quest for flavor and a study that we read that the average food in the US traveled 1500 miles from farm to plate. And therefore food was being bred to travel, not to taste great. And if you wanted food that tasted really great, we had to go out and find people who were growing for flavor, which was often a smaller local farmer growing a more diverse crop and not transporting as far. And that turns kind of the business model of the industrial food system upside down. That was the birth of our commitment towards local purchasing, which flowed into all of the other initiatives over the years.

>> Craig Gould: But sometimes it can be difficult to communicate that commitment at the customer level. You know, sometimes you know that this is what is a differentiator for you. But you can’t think of it as a marketing strategy. You almost have to think of it as a cultural strategy.

Companies need to make claims around sustainability that will enhance customer experience

Can you talk a little bit about that?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, when we first started on this path, and telling the story, we thought that the benefit to the customer was the taste so we didn’t even talk about the farmer or the agricultural methods or land use and all that. We, we really led with the taste that the customer would experience. And I think it’s really important when we’re talking about a, values based go to market strategy to put ourselves in the shoes of the customer and what matters to them and not ask them to make a compromise on quality. In my case, that’s taste. That could be in functionality if you’re maybe a cleaning product or something else that’s manufactured or in feel, if you’re a fabric company, you know, a clothing company. Not ask the customer to make a compromise for sustainability or for your values because they’re probably not going to do it, but that your values based idea, your sustainability idea will enhance their experience. So again, we started with taste and then as people started to care more about these issues, we started to talk more about it to customers. So our Farm to Fork program was formalized in 1999 and our marketing of it started in 2004. And I think that’s really important, that operations were five years ahead of marketing. Right. This wasn’t driven by a promise that we couldn’t deliver, which is tempting for a lot of people to speak aspirationally, but not really be doing what they’re talking, they’re claiming. and then when we started talking about the issue, and I see so many companies fall into this trap, you’re in love with the issue and you’ve put all this work into it. And so you want to tell every detail, be it on your package or on signage or on your website and you just have this onslaught of information for people. My director of communications would often accuse me of going to the PhD level when people needed the 101. And she was absolutely right because you’re so in love with this story. And so you have to continue to simplify, simplify, simplify so that people can get a quick hit of information. And then if they want more, of course, have it available on your website. Let those who want to deep dive get into the anals of everything. But you need to have that quick hit of an idea for the casual customer.

>> Craig Gould: The real, trap here is greenwashing because you can, you can accidentally fall into, especially with that marketing team, them going out and grabbing stock, photography, which is far too beautiful in your case. You’re talking about happy chickens or happy cows and next thing you know there’s this stock photography that really doesn’t reflect the environment of these animals. I think you talk in the Book about a, rush to claim victory when really you need to try to be very realistic and practical and transparent.

>> Maisie Ganzler: Right. We all remember the. Well, those of us that are my age at least remember George Bush standing on, the naval carrier with the big mission accomplished sign behind him right before the mission was accomplished. You don’t want to do that with your claims around sustainability, as you said, you will be rightly accused of greenwashing. And those claims can be both verbal but also pictorial. As you talk about cage free eggs is a great example. You mentioned chickens. So cage free hens are, still in a barn. They are not out on pasture. And it’s very tempting to go to a stock picture library and pull out a beautiful meadow with chickens roaming free and put that next to your cage free claim. It’s not true though. It’s your, your hens are still going to be in a barn. So being really accurate is important. I’m doing some corporate advising work now and I was talking to a company recently that wants to make claims around the human rights in their supply chain. But it’s a really hard promise to make. Right. You can’t say if you’re buying things, agricultural products from overseas, to make the claim that your supply chain is slave free, for example, is probably not true or very hard to prove. And so my advice to their director of sustainability is talk about your actions, don’t talk about the overall promise. So say we’ve done these four things in order to, reduce the chance of slavery in our supply chain. We use this certification, we have this inspection, we have this code of conduct, we have, These visits that we do unannounced, in addition to all of that, then don’t make the leap to saying therefore we are slave free. just talk about your actions.

>> Craig Gould: Sure.

>> Craig Gould: I mean, in the book you talk about trying to avoid these absolutes because you’re setting yourself up for a case where even if it’s that 1, 2, 3, 4%, of instances where you’re not maintaining that promise, how are you going to deal with that? You said it was 100%. You said that there was zero of this or zero of that. I think the, you know, a great example you give, you know, goes back to the food industry, the El Campo. Can you talk about that example and maybe as a cautionary tale.

>> Maisie Ganzler: Yeah. So Bel Campo was a meat company that claimed that all of their meat came from their farm. So one particular ranch, and they had several butcher shops and direct to consumer sales of meat, all from this one ranch that had these really in depth sustainability practices. Well, one of their employees, a butcher in their Santa Monica shop went on Instagram Live. This was not an influencer, this was not a guy with hundreds of thousands of followers. But he went on IG Live and he said, this isn’t local. And he held up, meat from Tasmania of all places. So again, he was in Santa Monica. This was me coming from Tasmania, definitely not local. He also talked about, that they claimed everything was organic. And he showed meat that had the certified USDA choice sticker on it, but not organic. And that video got over 30,000 views. And it was written about by the LA Times, the San Francisco Guardian, Eater, not, Sam’s Chronicle, sorry, the Guardian in the uk. So it went global Eater, it went everywhere. And of course the company reacted quickly and said they would look into it and said if even one bit of meat came from something not from our farm, it’s too much. Well, when they did their internal investigation, it turned out by their accounting that they were serving their own product 94% of the time. Now, I can tell you, as somebody who has written dozens of sustainability initiatives and spent many, many hours with spreadsheets, I would throw a party at 94% success. 94 is really good. But 94 is really bad if that 6% of the time you don’t admit what you’re doing wrong and you try to fool your customers. One of the products that they were selling in Santa Monica came from Pittman Family Farms, Mary’s Chicken. There’s a great sustainability story to it. Had they just told that story to their customers, if they had said, today we don’t have Belcampo chicken, we have chicken from Pittman, the Mary’s Chicken. There would be no story. There is no gotcha if you yourself tell the story first. Now, the Tasmania thing, that was never going to fly, that was egregious and certainly meant that there was a breakdown in whatever their auditing systems were, that anybody could even order product from Tasmania and have it go unnoticed.

>> Craig Gould: I don’t want people, or executives to come to this book thinking, well, you know, I don’t need to read Maisie’s book because I’m not in food service. But I feel like all of these questions apply across industries. How does my business affect the environment? how does my business treat its employees? How do my contractors treat its employees? Am I ignoring atrocities? am I not asking all the right questions? Because I don’t want to know about the atrocities? Can you talk about the practical lessons that can apply across industries.

Get into integrating those commitments throughout your business

>> Maisie Ganzler: Yeah, so the book’s written in five lessons and the first lesson is about picking your battles, which issues you’re going to take on. And then the second, third and fourth lessons, I would say, or really the second and third, I’m sorry, get into integrating those commitments throughout your business. And this is the part that’s kind of the, the least sexy stuff because it’s about policies and procedures and, and, and purchasing specs. But this is where the real work of sustainability is done. This is things like if you are a, a any kind of a business, let’s say you’re a services business, you’re a consulting business, right? But you want to have a commitment to your community through, through DEI and using smaller, community based suppliers. Even if it’s talking about your printing and your office supplies and your trash hauling and you know, everybody’s got suppliers. Right. Is that commitment written throughout your organization’s policies and procedures? And what I mean by that is, are people incented? Is it part of people’s, of people’s performance appraisal that they are making these commitments a reality? Are your systems set up for small, local, maybe non, English speaking, first suppliers to even deal with you? I’ll give you an example of that. at a company like Bon Appetit, we used a group purchasing organization, a big company that writes contracts for all sorts of supplies. They are used to dealing with other big companies. They have a very specific way of sending out requests for bids, of taking in information digitally. A, very sophisticated system. And if you’re saying, well, I want to use this print shop, that’s a mom and pop, that maybe is first generation. And you say to them, here’s the digital requirements for submitting a proposal. We only take uploads and here are 57 different forms you have to fill out. Some apply to you, some don’t apply to you. But you’re supposed to figure out which because it’s our standard purchasing package, right? That mom and pop probably doesn’t have the knowledge to deal with a proposal like that and therefore won’t propose. We would find we’d send things out these big packages and you’d get back like a price sheet. Just one piece of paper and you’d think we asked you for your business license and your health certificate and your this and your this and your this and we asked you for pricing in an Excel spreadsheet under four different scenarios and you sent us back one piece of paper. So can you create a system that that small entrepreneur can put a bid in, can take their price sheet and explain to you what they can do. Or are you, without intention, systematically boxing them out of even participating?

>> Craig Gould: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s corporate systemic discrimination in a way. Right?

>> Maisie Ganzler: 100%. 100%. And I think that we often post George Floyd’s murder. There was such a rush to making claims about diverse supplier initiatives, yet then we boxed people out from being able to participate by putting in all of these requirements, on the opposite side. Really interesting. We did a bid, for the Obama Presidential center in Chicago that’s being built when I was with Bon Appetit. And the bid required that every bidder, every company submitting a proposal had to have experience with a similar facility with over $5 million a year in revenue and had to be 40% minority owned. Well, when you look at similar facilities with over $5 million in revenue, almost none of them are managed by minority owned businesses. What that did very intentionally is it forced every big company that had the experience to partner with a small minority owned company and make sure that they had 40% ownership stake in the deal. That it wasn’t just a. On paper, you know, you show up and do a party and show that we have, we know some minority people, but that you actually give them 40% ownership in the deal. A very interesting approach.

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For executives who are used to looking at purely dollars and cents, can

Now back to our conversation.

>> Craig Gould: For the executive that’s used to looking at purely dollars and cents, can you talk about the benefits of, focusing on responsible business practices? Maybe it’s a little bit harder to quantify where dollars are being spent and what the benefit is. How do you, maybe it’s a question of how do you measure success?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, let me, let me answer. I think I heard two questions in there. One is, I do want people to look at dollars and cents. Absolutely. I strongly believe that a, values based, I keep saying a values based, go to market strategy because I’m talking about creating market value. If you think that sustainability or DEI or wellness or anti slavery, if these things are our philanthropy, if you think that these things are window dressing, if you think of them as feel good but not core to your business, that’s not what I’m talking about. You will not be successful. Your customers will see through that. I’m talking about using these initiatives to create market differentiation for your business, to tell your story, to get more customers, to get your customers to buy more often or to pay more based upon these things. So I absolutely want you to focus on the dollars and cents of it all. I think the second question was how do you measure that? And for me, it was really about using these, these ideals to drive revenue, to get people, as I said, to come to our custom, to our locations more often or to buy our services. at bon appetit, as a food service company, we had kind of a double sale. So you’ve got the sale to the institution, to the school, or to the company to bring you on as the food service company. And then you’ve got the everyday sale of the person coming for lunch or breakfast or dinner and making a purchase. And I think, a really obvious way to track is if you look at coffee and there are so many different. Coffee is so many different things. Right. And so do you have a coffee brand that has a value story behind it? and then can you look at what does that do to your sales of coffee? When you’re talking about where it comes from, who’s growing it, what the environmental benefits are of it, does that increase your coffee sales? If it doesn’t, if that’s not resonating with your customer, that’s probably not the right battle to pick. Right. so I think you talk to your sales reps, you talk to the people who are closest to your company, to your customers, sorry. And you say, when you start talking about these issues, does your sales target, do their eyes light up? Do they engage? Do they ask more questions? Or do they say, let’s get back to price? If you’re in a low price industry, if all you’re competing on price, this might not be your go to market strategy. But a lot of us, want to compete on, more than price.

>> Craig Gould: But if you do it successfully, you can. You can really enable some serious brand loyalty. Right?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Brand loyalty from your customers and maybe equally important, from your employees. We all know about the cost of recruitment and how important retention is that. That employee churn is incredibly expensive. People will stay with you. I stayed with bon appetit for 30 years, and I was not unusual. I was not the longest employee. people would stay with us for 5, 10, 30, 40 years. And when you ask why was often because they valued working in a place that cared about people and cared about the environment.

>> Craig Gould: You know, there’s the old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. And I feel like I see evidence of that in some of your stories about how you manage these relationships and reach out to what could be the worst enemy of a company like Bon by engaging and managing those dialogues. There were cases where they would actually acknowledge good work that you had done. And, you know, when the negative voices out there, when they acknowledge that you’re doing something right, that’s priceless. That they can acknowledge the good work you’ve done.

>> Maisie Ganzler: It’s funny that you use that adage, because I actually had a, title for one of the sections of the book that I wound up changing that was keep your friends close and your enemies. Wait, you don’t have any enemies. So I was thinking exactly that. I’m glad it came through. And it’s. When talking about working with NGOs and activist organizations and your first reaction often when you hear something like PETA’s calling or Greenpeace is like, close the doors, batten down. the. They’re going to protest us, you know, and they will if they don’t see you as working towards the goal that they are trying to achieve. It turns out that even those really tough activist organizations are most often pretty darn happy with incremental progress. They want you to engage, so they want to talk to you, hear them out and tell them what’s stopping you from doing exactly what they want. Explain to them how your industry works, how your supply chain works, what are the problems along the way that you need to solve and turn them into a partner versus an adversary. I actually, I did 12 interviews for the book, and one of the people I interviewed, Josh Bach, spent 20 years working for the Humane Society of the United States, but now has an organization called Accountability Board. And it’s all about doing shareholder action against companies that have made promises around animal welfare and aren’t living up to them. So it kind of, was spurred by Carl ICAHN Taking on McDonald’s. A couple years ago, Carl Icahn waged a proxy battle against McDonald’s because they weren’t living up to the commitment they had made 10 years earlier around ridding their supply chain of gestation crates and pork. And that’s a very food inside baseball issue. But just imagine, whatever industry you’re in, Carl Icahn comes a knock in, right, and says, I want to upset your apple cart. You’re not living up to your promises. Well, McDonald Spencer, $16 million to counter Carl’s proxy battle, not including the internal strife that that must have caused. Right. And when Josh saw that amongst some other shareholder action that he had done in his time at the Humane Society, he said, this is a really interesting tool of change. So I interviewed Josh and I said, how do you stay away from that? What do you do so that there isn’t shareholder action? So Carl Icahn’s not coming after you. And the answer was really have a conversation, be transparent. If you’re going to miss a deadline, call him up and say, I’m not making this deadline. This commitment that we made turned out to be harder than we thought it was going to be. Here’s the five reasons that it, that it didn’t happen. And most importantly to him, here’s the six things we’re going to do to keep working towards the goal as long as they’re working towards the goal. Josh, it really blew my mind. They were hugely supportive when Burger King made a commitment around cage free eggs of 2%, not 100% of their supply. We talked about not doing absolutes, but 2%. Josh was thrilled. Then, of course, in a couple years he says, can we go to 5%? Can we go to 10%? Is it a slippery slope? Yes, it’s a slippery slope, but bring them in as your partner and they’ll celebrate even your small wins.

College students are your best test case and your best, um, user group

>> Craig Gould: I think one of the things I find interesting in the book is I feel like you are somebody that is willing to open a dialogue with the next generation that you respect and are open to dialogues with folks that are still in college. And maybe that has something to do with bon appetit, you know, being on campuses and some of the interesting opportunities that led to. You actually sit down with students to, you know, hear their concerns. These college students can sort of be canaries in the coal mine. I think we also have to, in this generation think of what voice they have in media because media is distributed now. It’s, on a micro level versus what we Think of as big three networks. All of these college kids are little micro media networks and they each have a voice. Can you talk about how you would value and engage with that younger audience?

>> Maisie Ganzler: College students are absolutely your best test case and your best, user group because, not constrained in thinking by what has been. And they’re in a place where they’re testing limits and wanting to invent and are probably, you know, irrationally confident about their skills to solve every problem known to man. Right. And some not known to man yet. And, they’re not thinking about the dollars and cents every step of the way. So they are, they are testing ideas and they are thinking forward. And they are going to be the next employees at Google, at wherever you’re going to serve. They are going to be your consumers next. Right. So we often see trends starting on college campuses and then accelerating throughout the population. You mentioned the media piece. We actually saw our first awareness of how much texting was going to change how people interacted by serving a, university called Gallaudet in Washington, D.C. which is a school for the deaf. And when texting was kind of nascent, the Gallaudet kids were texting all the time because obviously they couldn’t call and make phone calls. They were deaf. Right? And we saw how fast things spread. How you could do mass texts, how you could text while you were in class, you didn’t even have to wait for a break. How they could text their parents no matter where they were in the world. And that information was going to spread like wildfire. So no matter what industry you’re in, even if you’re not directly serving college students, I, really urge you to get on college campuses and talk to college students, either in a formal focus group kind of way or just to spend some time hanging out in that environment. if you have, some sort of a connection to where you went to school and your professors, can you go and lecture in a class and hear the questions that the students are asking you? You will learn more than you can believe.

>> Craig Gould: Let’s say I figured out what I’m passionate about. And as a leadership group who have chosen to make a commitment. If I’m a small organization, you know, it may be easier. I, know that these are shared values because I hired each one of these people and I know who they are and we have a conversation, you know, in the conference room over pizza. But when it becomes a much larger organization, can you talk about the practicalities and how do you go about communicating whatever this mission is? Throughout the organization because it really becomes a question of culture. Maybe you didn’t start as a B corp and it wasn’t there from the beginning, but now this is a new vision and you, you want it to permeate. How do you make that happen?

>> Maisie Ganzler: So, I think there’s two things you need to do. One is you need to make sure that, as I said before, all of your policies, procedures, all of the formal structure of your business integrates these values. So it’s having a values based mission statement that is in your recruiting ad that is part of the hiring process that leads your employee handbook. Our employee handbook started with a letter from our CEO and founder, Fidel Baucio about the type of culture that you have just joined. And our formal we had a dream, not a mission statement because, Fidel wanted people to make an emotional connection. So a dream. Our dream was to be the premier on site restaurant company known for its commitment to socially responsible practices and culinary expertise. We are a culture driven to create food that is alive with flavor for the health of our communities, environment and guests. So right there at the beginning, those values are there. So you’ve got, you’re integrating throughout all of your systems. Then in addition to that, you got to do some fun, quirky things to keep reminding people and get people excited. So I did things like, when we did a big relaunch of our Farm to Fork policies, we did a video with Farm to Fork farmers. So kind of a, you know, inspirational, just internal facing video and sent it out to every single location along with bags of organic popcorn that had come from a Farm to Fork vendor and those little red and white kind of popcorn bags. And we had every location when they did their morning lineups, pop popcorn and have everybody have a little snack and watch this video. So you’re disrupting kind of normal day to day with this, on this cultural change that you’re talking about. when I started with Bon Appetit, we had about 1200 employees. We had over 20,000 when I retired. And I had to do things like I had little cookies made that looked like our president and our CEO and shipped them around the country with a message from them. Now in that case, I forgot to tell the president and CEO I had made those cookies and they were quite surprised to actually be in a location when the box arrived and there were like hundreds of little cartoon versions of them. but luckily I knew my audience and they had a good sense of humor. So continuing to have those cultural touchstone moments even when like you said, we can’t meet everybody around the table. Can we mail ourselves to everybody in some personal quirky way and tell the story?

>> Craig Gould: You know, is there a particular corporation outside of Bon Appetit that you saw that they were doing things the right way that you can kind of point to and say they’re really trying to do things right?

>> Maisie Ganzler: Well, as I said, I spoke to 12 different people and they were all handpicked by me. So of course I think they’re doing things the right way. but some of the, of the standout stories that I heard, I talked to Chris Arnold who was the communications director for Chipotle for the great rise of Chipotle’s kind of ascension as well as during. If anybody has followed Chipotle, they had several years of trouble around food safety issues. So he rode the wave and he had the tough part. And I think what really came through for me was how again they used this all for business benefit that Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle early on decided that their food story about the quality of their food and they define quality as taste, but also around the economic and social impacts put them in a different category than other quick service restaurants and therefore they should be reviewed by restaurant reviewers. And Chris talked about opening their first restaurant in New York and getting a review in the New York Times that was positive and how much that meant to them. from a publicity standpoint, you know, you can’t buy that kind of publicity now. Publicity that you can buy that they did. I asked him about, I don’t know if you remember but during the Grammys one year Chipotle showed, put a two minute ad that was a Coldplay song, the Scientist as sung by Willie Nelson to an animation of a story of a, of a pig farmer who had industrialized his farm and then got. Actually had an accident on the farm and got an infection and developed a antibiotic resistance that was directly linked to the antibiotics that are used in pig production. And he went back to the start, as the Scientist song says, and re. engaged with traditional farming practices that don’t use antibiotics and all those industrial ills. And it was two minutes. And I thought how did you afford a two minute ad? And first of all, he didn’t call it an ad, he called it a short film. And they actually engaged a filmmaking company to do it, not an advertising company and said that that was much less expensive. And Willie Nelson donated all of his services and his royalties because he cares about farmers, right he’s been involved in Farm Aid. And so this two minute film that you and I remember years later cost them $400,000. Now I didn’t have $400,000 in my advertising budget, but most companies do at that size. And you can imagine what Chipotle’s competitors are spending, what Taco Bell’s spending. But putting their values first and telling their story in a different way resonated with customers. And as Chris said, he thought that the key was to entertain people and whip a little education into them. that was how he saw it. Entertainment with little whipping of education. It was a great movie.

What issue do you still want to whip a little education into people

>> Craig Gould: What issue do you still want to whip a little education into people? I mean, is it, is it gestational crates or overfishing? You know, if there’s an issue that you kind of had to deal head on with in the book, which one do you still educate people on? that maybe they have no idea.

>> Maisie Ganzler: We took on a lot of issues at Bon Appetit, animal welfare, like you mentioned, with gestation crates and cage free hens and sustainable seafood and antibiotics use. And we had a lot of wins and we had a lot of still work to do. But the area that I personally am the most passionate about is probably because it doesn’t have a clear answer, is around the human element in our supply chain, be it farmworkers or people that are involved in fishing. there’s been a number of exposes around people being enslaved in the seafood industry. We know that there is slavery in the food industry in this country, of course overseas, but also here. And I don’t think that people, the general public is as aware of these issues as I wish them to be. As I said, there’s not clear answers. It’s very hard. When you talk about salmon, we know what salmon are going to do. They’re going to swim upstream. We’ve just, on the west coast had a dam removed and salmon are swimming upstream in rivers, spawning for the first time in 100 years. We know scientifically that’s going to happen. Human beings are more complicated. We don’t know exactly what intervention or exactly what they will do. And so, if you ask what, I’m personally passionate, it’s about that human side and I’m continuing even in my retirement to do some work around those issues. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily what I would take from a business perspective as my differentiator because it’s a hard one to solve.

>> Craig Gould: it’s polling season, right? If you Were to poll the American public and ask them, you know, it’s 20, 24. Is there still slavery in the United States? You know, the overwhelming answer would be no. But, you know, when you talk about, you know, how does it happen? In the book, you talk about these, coyotes that are helping bring immigrants illegally into the country. And the immigrants have the hope of finding a way of life. They don’t know what they’re getting into. They wind up owing these people that helped them get into the country. And they’re placed into basically slave labor as a means of, well, you need to work off what you owe me at pennies on the dollar in conditions where 20 people are sharing 1200 square feet in living conditions and working from sunup to sundown in a way that there really is no way for them to get out of their situation.

>> Maisie Ganzler: I had that exact conversation, just in September. I spoke at the global Shrimp Forum in Utrecht, the Netherlands. And I was sitting at dinner, and there was a man there who was a shrimp farmer. And we’re talking about the. There had just been an article published, about slavery in the shrimp industry in India. And this man says to me, I know our industry has a problem overseas, but I raise shrimp in Florida. Slavery is not part of my, my problem. And I said, did you know that one federal prosecutor called Florida right where you are ground zero for modern day slavery? And he went, what? Florida. And it was that exact scenario that you’re talking about that men had paid what they call coyotes or human smugglers to bring them to Florida from Mexico to work in the tomato fields. And when they got to Florida, they were locked in a U haul truck. They were forced to live their lives in a U haul truck and then being taken to the fields to work without pay because they owed these coyotes so much money that they had to work it off, given copious amounts of alcohol so that they spent their time in a stupor, and they were charged for that alcohol. Right. And when they tried to leave, we’re told that their families in Mexico would have to pay their debts one way or another. Right? So we’re talking about literal enslavement of people, not talking about, oh, I worked so hard, I work like a slave. We’re talking about people being locked in a truck and forced to work without pay and not the ability to leave. So not to get too political, we are recording this on election day. I don’t know when it will air. There’s been lots of talk about immigrants, illegal and legal immigration. I don’t think that that is any scenario that any American would trade places with. In fact, I spoke to a Florida tomato grower who said that he had put out ads trying to get workers from the local community for months and not one single person applied for the job.

>> Craig Gould: Maisie I really appreciate your time and I, really have enjoyed our conversation and hopefully executives listening will take benefit and find something to be passionate about and make part of their company’s culture. The book is you can’t market manure at lunchtime. And Maisie thank you for your time today.

>> Maisie Ganzler: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these things I care about so much.

>> Craig Gould: Awesome.