Here’s what we’re looking at for the next 4 days. Most locations are open regular hours tomorrow. Monday the PRK truck and both restaurants are open regular hours. You can get more details on exact hours of operations by clicking on the Locations tab of this website, or by following the Twitter feed for your location.
Have a great holiday weekend everyone!
I was waiting in the T today at Kendall and took a picture of the MBTA map. It’s hard to believe there’s a Clover (or will be one soon) at a lot of those T-stops.
Tomorrow is pretty special. It’s the end of our first full week for cloverAQU at the Aquarium stop on the Greenway. cloverNOR is kicking off the weekend near Haymarket in the North End. And starting tomorrow, we’ll be parking cloverGOV every Friday at Government Center. We’ve updated our Locations and Hours page to make sure everything is easy to access.
Every location has its own Twitter feed. We try hard to update 3 times a day: when we open, when lunch is up, and when we close. Because our menu changes every day, your location’s Twitter is the best way to find out what we’re serving.
SATURDAY 2/9/13: ALL LOCATIONS CLOSED
SUNDAY 2/10/13: RESTAURANTS OPEN
MONDAY 2/11/13: ALL LOCATIONS OPEN (HSQ, HUB, MIT, DWY, LMA)
All Clover restaurants and trucks are closed today. Stay tuned to Twitter for updates. We plan to re-open the restaurants tomorrow and return to normal operations Monday pending MBTA operations and a lift of the driving ban.
Hope you’re enjoying the snow. I just finished a pancake breakfast with my family. We’ve already been out to play in the snow and plan to spend as much time as we can having fun today. Violet (not 2 years old yet) has never seen anything like this. It’s all new for her and really fun.
That picture? We skipped out manager meeting this past Tuesday and took everybody ice skating. When we take outings we try to do things that are new/ different for our managers. Given how much time we spend teaching new things to employees and customers, I think it’s great for us to remind ourselves once a month or so how it feels to do something that is new and hard. Only a few of us knew how to skate, for the rest this was a new-ish experience.
We’ve made some updates to the teachers guide. Largest change is that we’ve added Assistant Manager Training. Here’s the latest v.10.12:
This goes out to all of you devoted City Hall customers that come to our truck every Friday for breakfast and lunch.
Tomorrow only: we’re not going to be running the truck there tomorrow. You can blame this lowboy (the refrigerated sandwich station). It isn’t cooling below 70 degrees. If we put food in it, the food would be held in the TDZ (temperature danger zone). You might not know this, but we temp these stations constantly throughout the day, and if they’re not cooling properly, we’ll shut it down.
I’m having a technician come in and fix this tomorrow, but it means we won’t be able to run the truck. Really sorry about this. Keep in mind the PRK and DWY trucks are both less than a 10 minute walk away.
We had an idea: each Team Leader gets a bonus worth $2 for every hour they work in any month they score 100% on the customer experience check and sanitation check. This could be huge for Team Leaders. Like enough money to buy a nice bike each month.
But to make it work we had to come up with a “customer experience check” and a “sanitation check.” We’re pretty new to this being a larger company thing, and believe it or not we didn’t have anything like this in place. Lucia and I sat down to put together a checklist for customer experience. We wanted to focus on the stuff that matters the most. And we didn’t want anything to be debatable. So each answer should be black or white, it either happened or it didn’t. No in-betweens.
This was our first draft. Since we’ve gone through a few iterations. And we put together an online form using this tool called Wufoo (terrible name but it works well). And we did inspections for August. Today Lucia is going to announce the results. I hope everybody aced it, but to be honest I’m not sure I would have first time around when I was running MIT.
If you’re a Lindentree member, here’s what you’re getting in your CSA box this week. If you’re not a member (and this is making you hungry), we’re already in the planning stages for next year’s CSA program at Clover.
That pile of leaves at the top is edamame. I’m really excited to go home and cook it tonight.
Did you get a bad basil sandwich from us this month? If so, we’re really sorry. This sandwich should be really, really awesome, and it hasn’t been. Couple issues we’ve had: 1.) the quality of the basil spread has varied a lot across locations. Some spread was really fibrous, some was sort of bland. The recipe wasn’t being followed correctly everywhere (bunch of people weren’t adding salt). 2.) A bunch of you were saying the sandwich wasn’t filling or satisfying enough.
So we’re making some changes to this. You should be able to see these changes today:
1.) Basil spread is going to be made every morning in the kitchen and sent to locations rather than being made on board each location. This means you won’t smell basil in the morning on the trucks, but it will let us keep an eye on the quality.
2.) We’re going to be adding mayo and adding another slice of havarti
3.) More salt on the cucumbers.
Let us know if you have this today if it’s improved. We’ll be taking note of these changes for next year when this sandwich comes around again. And for those of you asking, the rumor is true. There’s a new seasonal sandwich coming on soon.
We spend a lot of time answering questions. Here’s Lou (cloverLMA) walking through our sometimes confusing menu. Here’s your chance to answer a few of our questions. You can help us become better at feeding you. (And maybe it’s your opportunity to make that menu a little less confusing for every other first timer!)
If we gave you a survey card when you last stopped by please complete the survey below. We really appreciate your help here. In the past we’ve had as many as 9 out of 10 customers we invited to the survey respond. That’s amazing! This stuff helps us plan, helps us focus on problems, makes us scratch our heads and figure out new problems. It’s been a critical part of our development since day one.
Thanks again!
We just had our All-Company Meeting. We moved from monthly to quarterly meetings, so we’ve been trying to make them a bit more social. We’re getting to a size now where it’s possible for 2 employees to never meet.
Those tasting cups are from a little game we played. We split everyone up onto teams randomly and gave each team cups containing Clover ingredients and ten minutes to write down what was in the cups, and how we use each ingredient. Mary’s team won, we got them tokens to go to the farmers’ market.
Anyone recognize the person in the left-hand corner? Hint: Ayr hired her when Clover was getting too busy to run with just 2 people.
We're here to make food you love, the kind you talk about and look forward to eating. The Clover Food Lab is serving up a new type of fast food. This food is local, it’s just-cut, when we can it is organic.
You can learn more about
our origins,
our food,
our mistakes,
and everything else about us at this website.
Ayr Muir
Founder and CEO
RECENT COMMENTS