Craveworthy Brands and its Founder and CEO were recently featured on business.com (b.).
With more Americans trying to cook at home to bring down their food budget, restaurants are offering a return to value menus. Gregg Majewski, Founder of Craveworthy Brands and former CEO of Jimmy John’s, believes it never had to be this way. He maintains, in fact, that many brands shifted customer loyalty by overextending their post-pandemic inflationary grace period.
Majewski told b. how businesses can create real value and rebuild trust in the process.
Majewski: My entire life has been entrepreneurial. Even at Jimmy John’s, it was an entrepreneurial position, even though I was working for somebody else. Every job I’ve ever had, it’s been my butt on the line, no matter what the position I had.
That was something I saw from my dad. He started his own company and wasn’t home, but his work ethic was: “You only get ahead if you make it your own.”
So I still look at Jimmy John’s today as my company, even though I haven’t been there in years. It will always be that way because I gave my blood, sweat and tears to it.
There’s a different switch when you go all-in on yourself. It’s a different level of sweat. A lot of people just can’t deal with that type of pressure.
Majewski: The idea behind food is you have to crave it. I look at brands that need to fit a niche, or something that leaves people wanting more. “Is it because I’m fast? Is it because my food’s outstanding? Am I consistent?” Whatever it is, I’ve created a craveworthy experience for [customers] where I solve a problem in their lives without them even knowing it.
Majewski: I think restaurants shouldn't take every opportunity they get to jack prices up because our costs went up.
What the grocery store does very well — and [why they’re] our biggest competitor right now — is when the cost of milk and eggs … fell back down, the consumer saw a price decrease. The cost of eggs did not stay at that new normal. We, as restaurants, kept our prices at that new normal from what the height was, and we alienated the customer base.
Two years ago, I was concerned that customers might push back too much, so I created new segments with value propositions, but they were new items and we don’t call them “value.” For example, I introduced a chicken thigh sandwich instead of just a normal chicken breast that we were charging, at the time, $15 for. We dropped our price to $7.99 for a chicken thigh, which is actually a better-fried sandwich. That moved 40 percent of my customers to buy that item because it was so much cheaper. I increased quality and gave them a better value proposition, but I never called that item “value.”
I think that’s where restaurants and all businesses have to get smarter. You don’t want to discount your brand. Once you start discounting, you’re telling your consumer that your product is really only worth the lower price. We don’t want to drive the customer to that rationale, that retail mentality, that everything’s always on sale when you walk into the store.
So we created items that offered great value but were still extremely high quality to get the stuff moving the way they should. The chicken thigh is always a less expensive product. It’s not that it’s significantly less per pound, the shape’s different, so it fills the bun differently. A fried chicken thigh is what the original southern chicken sandwich was built off of. They didn’t take breast meat. Breast meat was too valuable. They didn’t make that into a sandwich and bread it; that was for other things. So we just took off what everyone else was doing forever and brought it back.
Majewski: I think the restaurant industry, and all pricing, needs to ebb and flow with what the market should be, based on what you’re paying. You don’t get to make an extra seven points because food cost drops; that’s not right.
That goes for aluminum prices and manufacturing. Customers have it written in that when aluminum prices go up and down, [the manufacturing] price goes up and down. There’s a sliding scale adjusted every quarter. They’re smart.
If everybody’s winning as a group, everyone will see more. That was our idea when we introduced these cheaper meal options on our menu. We wanted our consumers to win. And if my consumers are winning and they’re craving a meal, they’re going to choose me. They can come in, get four chicken sandwiches, and be out the door for less than $50.00.
The biggest fault of every businessperson is you’re so in the weeds, worried about today and tomorrow. What will take your company to the next point is thinking years down the line, because you’re giving yourself something to work towards.
Walt Disney said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” He’s one of the people that I look to all the time. Who would have ever thought building Disneyland was going to do what it did for him? But the guy thought so far out — and saw something that no one else could see — and then created a culture that everybody bought into. Even after he passed, that dream lived on, because the culture was so incredibly strong.
That’s exactly how I feel Craveworthy has to think. We, as leaders, should think so much bigger than everything else that you can do. You need to worry about today and tomorrow, but if you’re not setting those goals so far down the line to give yourself something to work for, you’re never going to get to those points. You’ll always just be putting out the fires of the day. Jimmy [John] was an incredible man and leader — I owe him everything I could possibly do in this industry. What he taught me in the time that I was there was that we could do anything. There was nothing that I didn’t believe we could accomplish. We wanted to be the No. 2 sandwich concept. We got there.
Majewski: I’ve had restaurants fail, and I held onto them way longer than I ever should have because they were important to me. I learned that you have to be willing to move on to the next thing. If you learn something from the time you fail, it’s OK to fail. If you fail and don’t learn something from it, then it’s not OK to continue to go down the same path. It’s OK to walk away because you can 100 percent build yourself back up.
I remember laying on the couch during COVID, listening to music to try to pacify myself on how I was going to keep food on people’s plates. It wasn’t a matter of whether I knew I’d be OK, but I didn’t know how my employees were going to be OK. I went all-in and cashed all my savings to pay my employees. My wife looked at me and told me I was crazy. And I said, “I can rebuild. They can’t. I have to be ready to take care of them.” That’s, again, part of that leadership mentality that you have to have. My job was them, not everything else.
My greatest goal is to make my team millionaires. I could take all of it, but I know I can’t succeed without an incredible team around me every day. If my team knows I want to change their lives, they’re a lot more willing to work 60-65 hours during tough times. My team doesn’t go home at five o’clock. They go home when the job’s done. We’re all working towards a common belief that we’re going to have a life-changing experience. That’s the only way a company can be successful. I’ve seen too many people not give back to those who have taken care of them, and companies never get to the next level because of it.
I’m an Apple fanboy. I think they’re great, and their employees have made a ton of money, but they’re holding more cash in their coffers than most countries. Deploy that, invest it, use it. If I have money to distribute, I want my team to win. It’s the least I can do for them for believing in me.