What Nobody Orders
Two stories this week about the stuff nobody sees. The earnings call transcripts that tell a better founder story than any interview, and the water recipe behind a perfect coffee. Both are about the same thing, the best operators obsess over the ingredients their customers will never think to ask about.
Extra Everything: The Story of Chipotle
Quartr is a B2B service specialized in earnings call transcripts. They became viral a couple months back with AI-generated vignettes representing brands to announce their earnings calls, you probably saw the three burgers for McDonald’s, or the blurry vision for Uber. Smart top-of-funnel play for a data product, and it worked.
But they’re more than just pretty design, they can write too. In fact the company also invested in a really good content team writing deep dives on public companies. The latest one is on Chipotle.
I’m biased as I am a big fan of Chipotle. When I studied at San Diego State University, it was the only fast food chain on campus, and for someone freshly debarked from Europe, Chipotle with the efficiency of the US and the quality of Mexican food was the quintessence of America. Laughable now, but 2010 Chipotle had swag.
The founder story is genuinely great. Ells graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, always wanted to open a Michelin-star restaurant, but to pay bills started with a taco shop in his rural town. The shop generated so much cash from day one that it would have been stupid to not open another one. Then a thousand, all while focusing on quality, Ells kept testing every recipe and enforcing strict vendor like the one selling beef without GMOs.
But what is less known, and what the Quartr piece surfaces well, is that it’s actually Brian Niccol (now Starbucks CEO) who made Chipotle the business it is today, taking it from a $4B to an $11B company.
The deep dive is long, probably too long even if you’re a fan of the bowl. But what makes the exercise interesting is the method. Quarter’s content team leverages earnings calls to write narrative. Many facts in their report are supported by direct quotes from earlier transcripts. Getting quotes from Ells himself, without having to interview him, is quite unique, and it’s the best possible demo of their product.
If you’re old and cool enough, you hung out at Colette in Paris. The temple of hype where Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams were regulars. Colette, which opened in 1997, was also known for its Water Bar, a place where you could taste water from all over the world. Avant-garde, bordering on absurd for the time.
Turns out Colette was just early. Water became the new champagne, and the most obsessive operators in hospitality are now treating it like a proprietary ingredient.
Matt Rodbard in his excellent podcast Taste interviews Hafiz Mangalji, a coffee fanatic who opened Hyunah, a members club in Brooklyn. A place where you can play with the most expensive coffee instruments and test a large variety of specialty coffee. Hafiz is also intransigent with the water used to brew, not just filtered, but remineralized and loaded with electrolytes. For coffee, that level of control makes sense, water is 98% of the cup.
But then there’s Simon Kim, the owner of Cote and Caqodaq just opened Bar Chimera, and to produce the best martini in the world he went full lab coat:
Kim’s team “tested more than 50 types of water, pH levels, mineral content, and structure to finally come up with the perfect water for your martini.” “We created a proprietary water that is first filtered for purity, then remineralized and loaded with electrolytes to restore essential minerals, even more so when drinking.”
50 types of water, for a martini... Hospitality’s obsession with craft has reached the one ingredient everyone assumed was a commodity.
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The Ells story at Chipotle shows something most founders miss. He didn't start with a scalable vision. He started with one shop that worked, then had the discipline to replicate what made it work instead of chasing growth. The obsession with sourcing and testing came before the empire. Niccol took it from $4B to $11B by scaling what already worked. He didn't invent the model. He just built the systems to run it across a thousand locations without losing the core.