Everything will be different tomorrow
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We used to have everyone store their bags on the truck dashboard when they came to work. As volumes grew, we had to hire more staff and…… you guessed it, with more staff came more bags. They started to pile up on the floor and get in the way so we came up with the idea of placing hooks over the driver’s seat to utilize this unused space during service. This made a huge difference and the improvement only cost $2.29 for the hooks!
Vincenzo is our new listman. I think he’s going to write about this soon in more detail.
You wouldn’t believe how different it is to operate 2 trucks vs. 1. Wouldn’t seem that different, but it is. Add to that the growth of both trucks, and we’re talking about a 4-fold increase in customers served this July vs. July last year. That means more dishes, more smallwares, more food, more employees, more of everything. We live by lists these days.
We’ve all been spending a lot of our time lately on operations. And it’s not about making these 2 trucks work. It’s about setting Clover up with the systems we’ll need to support many trucks. That’s right, if you haven’t noticed yet we’re ambitious.
Hat, one of our favorite employees from last summer, came back to work 2 weeks ago. I asked her yesterday what she noticed today vs. last summer. Her answer: “It’s soo much easier.” While the current crew would have trouble believing that, it’s true. And great to hear. We’ve been working hard to make everybody’s jobs easier. Still a long way to go, but we’re making great progress.
Exciting news: the MIT whiteboard is finally re-painted. Chris did this late Thursday night. We use this special whiteboard 2-part epoxy. It’s the best solution I’ve found, but it has 2 problems:
(1) It oxidizes in the sunshine (which is why the board looked so muddy)
(2) It loses it’s erasability after about 3 months of use
The solution is that we need to re-finish the board once every 3 months. Last time I painted it? 26th of August (you can look for that post). OK, so we’re not quite hitting once every 3 months. Something to improve.
By the way, the observant out there will notice some other changes. With our whiteboard, as with everything at Clover, we make changes constantly. Early on I tried many different whiteboard presentations. We’ve settled on this for the following reasons:
That guy there is from ADP, a paycheck processing company. He’s the one who bought me that muffin I wrote about the other day. There are basically 2 huge paycheck processing companies: ADP and Paychex. So I’m trying to decide which to go with.
I’ve been driving myself and my employees crazy with payroll. We’ve been hiring a lot of people, which means tons of paperwork. It’s driving me batty. Each employee we hire on takes me about 20 minutes of data entry. So I’m usually doing this late at night, and it’s a hassle. And then I find that I don’t have a check to make the payment, you get the idea. And so more often than I’d like we’ve had people who get paid late, which is awful. So time to fix all of that.
To be completely honest I’m not convinced there’s going to be that much of a difference between the two payroll services. So I’m concerned about cost and ability to assist me in recovering any tax credits I may be due.
We’re growing. You’re going to be seeing more stories like this one. Efficient operations have been important to us from day one, and we’ve been constantly experimenting and improving. But with the new truck (completely new floor plan), larger volumes, and larger staff our procedures are more important than ever. This is about making sure the food tastes great every time you eat with us, making sure you’re not waiting too long, making sure our employees are happy and not stressed out.
One of the major time sinks has been organizing utensils and dishes at the end of the day. We re-assess our needs almost weekly, but we’re still at a staggering number of items that need to go on the truck every single day, exactly the same way. I just counted nearly 400 items on the current pack list. These range from utensils, to mixing bowls, blenders, containers of food, boxes of cucumbers, etc. Now imagine 2 trucks getting cleaned and packed at the end of the day, making sure everybody has every single item they need. And don’t forget that if the fry boats are not packed, no fries to serve. If the falafel scoop is not packed, no falafel to serve.
Chris and Enzo have been brainstorming ways to color code the items by truck so the sorting process becomes one of “grabbing everything with a white tag” rather than picking and sorting to a list. Enzo and I were up at 3am in the kitchen working on this last night, but I think it’s going to be worth the effort. We’ll let you know how it goes.
If you haven’t heard, Dewey is growing up. It’s time for a little truck-to-truck competition. Our first ever. We’re going to be counting how many people are fed at each truck over the next 2 weeks. I’ll call the plays. And of course I’m a disinterested observer, right?
Hey Enzo! we know you’re killing it over there in Boston, we know you’ve got the Mayor on your side, did you sneak some pork into that BLT while I wasn’t looking?
But you know what, MIT is still king, at least after day 1 and 2 tallies are in. I’ll admit, we’ve had an advantage. The foul weather doesn’t matter as much when you’re working tech (vs. finance). And yeah, we’ve had a bit of a head start over at MIT. And yeah, breakfast and dinner are huge at MIT. But numbers are numbers. And we’re in an alley at MIT. I mean and alley. You have what, 10,000 people a day come out of that subway stop?
We’re just getting started. Feed more people!
(I didn’t give away any bias, did I? Disinterested observer, I promise. But I’ll admit, I’m an older brother, and you can ask my sisters who’ve had to deal with me for years, I’m always going to be the oldest. DWY like it or not, MIT is always going to be your big brother.)
We’ve been getting to know our neighbors in the new Dewey Square location. And we’re having a ton of fun. It’s early, but we know this: few of you are willing to tell me what is wrong (come on, I know there are things you don’t like, it’s far from perfect), you’re patient and don’t mind waiting in line, and many of you work in finance or are lawyers. We’ve found that on rainy days and very hot days it’s super slow out there. But that makes sense, right? Suits and challenging weather don’t mix very well.
Some of these differences have been easy to see, but the others are more subtle. The other day when I was back at the MIT truck I was taking orders with my iPhone 4. 3 out of 4 customers wanted a review. I’m not kidding. It was almost a problem, getting in the way of order taking. Everybody wanted to hear what I thought, touch it, etc. I had the same phone at Dewey the other day when we were testing our new order taking system and not a single person even noticed it. Awesome, hunh?
Some of you may remember the great sandwich disaster. This time drinks were struck.
Rolando and I just figured out last week that we’ve been serving up some really awful drinks. What does that mean? Some were way way to bitter, some too sweet. Many were watery. Few were balanced.
The problem is that we moved from a small operation to a large operation and didn’t put the proper tools (e.g., recipes) and controls in place. We may have been at this for as many as 3-4 weeks. That’s a lot of bad drinks. Sorry everybody.
We’ve completely re-worked both the Assam and the Hibiscus iced tea recipes. Tomorrow we’re going to be giving them both away for free on both trucks. That’s right, free. For everybody. It’s our way of apologizing. If you’ve thought our drinks could be better, you were probably right, give them another try tomorrow. If you never tried them, that’s OK, they’re free tomorrow. If you’ve had them and loved them, that’s great. Love them more tomorrow (they’ll taste better than ever and they’ll be free). Did I mention, free?
Bring it on summer. Bring it on Boston. The number of mouths we’re feeding daily has more than doubled in the past 4 weeks. That means we are making a ton more Hummus and Falafel. Which means our little 3 Qt. Robo Coupe (commercial food processor) is working overtime. Like 20-30 batches a day. 2-3 hours non-stop on the food processor.
So we made our largest equipment investment to date. We bought this bad boy for something like $8,000. I was hoping, but not entirely sure I was making the right choice. This sort of investment is strange, unlike a car you don’t get to test drive. You can talk to a few people, but you don’t get a chance to see if it will work until it arrives.
Now the hummus we used to spend 2 hours making is silky smooth in 20 seconds. Awesome.
It started with a phone call. Vincenzo, our fearless leader over at the Dewey truck, was in his second week working with us full time.
“Ayr, what kind of fuel does the truck take?”
At first I was confused. The Vincenzo added “Unleaded, right?”
And something about his tone told me exactly what had happened. “Oh s#@$! Turn the engine off immediately!” Then phone calls, etc. The mechanic: “Oh s@#$!”, my wife “Oh s@#$!”
a bunch more after the break… Read the rest of this entry »
Those of you who have been eating with us for a while know that things are always changing. We experiment constantly. We are always trying to improve. Your patience and encouragement is what makes this work, because I know better than anybody that we don’t always get it right.
Many of you have seen the evolution over time at the MIT truck, from no napkins, to a dispenser that never worked, to another dispenser that didn’t work, to another dispenser that didn’t work, to a rock, to a potato. Now we have real napkin dispensers. I did a ton of research and finally figured out the right dispenser. They are Torx, which are more friendly to most napkins than the last dispenser we had. They are a style that can fit a larger “cartridge” (meaning less fills, easier to pack), and they even let us put our logo on the side : )
We’re making a huge number of improvements right now. Running 2 trucks is pressure testing everything. And having amazing truck managers means every single detail is getting ferreted out. So thanks for your patience, and bare with us. If you notice something we should improve just mention it to us, we’ll thank you. Food, operations, anything. It’s our best chance at getting things right.
Those of you who’ve been following us since the beginning will remember several posts about bread. And some of you have suffered stock-outs.
We get our bread from Brooklyn. It’s a pain to go that far, and a long story explaining why we do it anyway. See some of the previous posts. Anyway, until we’re much larger we wont be able to get our bread made the way we want it in Boston. In the meantime we take weekly trips to NYC. This is Rolando loading bread at 6am yesterday morning. We freeze the bread at our commissary, thaw it overnight, then toast it for your sandwich.
We recently bought a re-supply van and now we’re able to use that to run the trips which are either exciting or a drag, depending on how you feel about driving a 9 hour round trip with a barely functioning radio.
OK, so he wasn’t exactly a customer. I broke one of our rules and gave a Soy BLT and fries away for free today. When he asked “so you have BLT here?” there was joy. When I explained it’s tempeh, no bacon, that joy vanished. But we made the sandwich. And despite some skeptical looks before biting into it, our Mayor ate the entire sandwich. Down to the last bite. See that, I took a picture to prove it. Thanks Mayor! We’re looking forward to your feedback next time you’re by.
Systems are improving back at the kitchen. These pickled onions and cabbage are inside “third pan” Cambros (clear kitchen-grade containers).
That’s Rolando chasing the Dewey truck on our first day. He’s got a block of Vermont Sharp Cheddar Cheese in his hand. Alright, so it’s not all sorted out yet, but we’re working on it.
We’re back in Dewey Sq. tomorrow (Tuesday) to kick off our second week in that location.
These poor awnings. They’ve been scraped on trees, whipped by the wind, and now crushed by colliding with a light pole. Uhg.
Rolando and Enzo were trying to move the Dewey truck and WHACK! down came a lightpost and crush went the awning. Uhg. Sorry lightpost. Sorry awning.
At Dewey park on the Greenway there’s a shipping carton behind the spot where we’re parking the truck. This shipping crate holds stuff and it has vegetables painted on it and a garden on the roof.
The problem is that there’s a giant eggplant on the end of the carton. And I swear, 50 times this morning I jumped because I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye a lady standing there in a purple dress. This eggplant has been wreaking havoc on my peripheral vision. Uhg, there it is again!
This is Justin, or is it Jason. Sorry, man, we’ll get to know you soon enough. Anyway, he’s our first customer at the Dewey location (near South station T stop). Breakfast sandwich and coffee.
We had a crazy day. We served maybe 4-5 times more of you than we were expecting. Tomorrow we return with more food and more staff on board the truck.
For the most part things went very well. There was an awful incident involving the truck and a light post (to be discussed in another entry), we didn’t get those eggs right for the sandwich because we didn’t have the right pots on board, and a bunch of other tiny things that none of you would have noticed, but we are trying to sort out.
Thanks all for coming out. Great to meet so many new people.
See that spot at the tip of Rolando’s finger? Come Tuesday there is going to be a Clover truck there. No kidding. Clover is coming to Boston. Details:
Dewey Square (right at South Station T-stop exit)
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
7am – 3pm
We can’t wait to meet new customers and get to know this area. To start with I’ve got to look into this whole “Dewey Square” thing. Is this one of those fake squares, that were just made up recently to assist with development, or is it a real square? I’d never heard of it before.
Hi all — back from a long weekend. Thought I’d take a post to reflect.
These past 6 weeks or so have seen us running around trying to deal with record customer growth with the backdrop of serious labor issues. We lost some folks we really depend on: medical issues, injury, family issues, deciding Clover is not right for them. We lost 4 full-time experienced employees over the course of 2 weeks, for our size operation that’s very dramatic. It’s been tough carrying the weight and Brian, Lucia, Matt, Rolando, and I have been scrambling and killing ourselves to keep up. We’re talking 18 hour days back to back and still seeing unfinished work piling up.
So this long weekend was especially valuable. And we’re approaching June with a more stable staffing set-up, better systems, and new energy coming on board. I’m excited to start focusing on some of the neglected parts of my job, and the crew is going to be able to build for the future rather than running around firefighting. Expect a bunch of new faces, some training, and within a week or two a more consistent Clover. Oh, and did I mention we’re going to have a truck in Boston?
In case you’re wondering that’s my son above, spending some quality time with his grandparent’s chickens back in Cummington, MA.
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