October 1, 2012

Return to MIT

Those of you at MIT have been seeing more of me lately. Those at other locations may be wondering where I’ve gone. I have this ambition of making MIT, the truck from which we sold our first sandwich ever, our training center. Sara, our manager there, is an amazingly gifted trainer/ developer of people, and she loves seeing folks grow.

So I’ve been working to make MIT something of a model for the rest of the company. That’s a lot of pressure on Adam, Pedro, Yessy, Randall, Sara, and the other folks who work that truck. But I’m hoping it’s fun for them as well. We’ve been working on very nuts-and-bolts type things. Making sure there is a great check-list for open and close that is being used daily. I’m a huge fan of checklists after reading The Checklist Manifesto, a really cool book. We’re getting all sorts of things fixed. Talking about cleaning standards and how to live up to them. Putting up sandwich cards to help make construction more clear. Refining roles on board the truck, so everybody knows what they should and shouldn’t be doing. We’re training in detail on coffee, talking about where our beens come from, what is different, what they taste like. Killing the line. That’s right, we’re committed to getting the line below 4 long, even at peak, and wait times sub-5 minutes, even at peak.

It’s been really fun to reconnect with all of the customers I got to know when I was running MIT. We’re approaching our 4th anniversary as a company, but I spent almost 1/2 of that time running the MIT truck. So it feels like a homecoming for me. I’ll be at this for another few weeks. In the meantime, see you at the truck!

Recent Posts

May 24, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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May 18, 2023
I used to eat Cheesy Grits almost every morning, and if you were eating with us around 2017, I bet you did too. We took our Plimoth-ground-grits off the menu for a little while, but now they’re back at all locations (except for the HUB for the time being). Stop in for breakfast during the next 2 weeks – we’re aiming for these to be hot and ready at 8am and we’ll be selling them til they’re out. The staff has been waking up extra early and adding a lot of extra whisking to their mornings, so we’d love to hear what you think. If you’ve never had our Cheesy Grits before, here are some things you should know….
May 16, 2023
What is Chris eating? When we toured the field at Siena, the crew was planting dahlia tubers. They get planted in warm soil, will grow all summer and will be ready for harvest in the fall. They reminded us of sunchokes, so we got to talking about whether the tubers are edible and it turns out they are! Are they delicious?
May 15, 2023
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If you’ve been reading for a while you probably know we hate waste. Most of the time, minimizing waste is pretty unglamorous, but every once in a while our mission to reduce waste takes us to some very cool places. I look after Clover’s grocery marketplaces (including our Assembly Row grocery store). A few months ago I noticed that the marketplaces were going through a lot of our paper bags. They’re compostable, which is great. But I think the best bag is one you can use over and over again.
April 22, 2023
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April 10, 2023
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March 15, 2023
That photo is corn fritters drizzled with maple syrup. We just started frying them up for a 2pm special – and they’re an element of our Maple Meal Box. If you head away from the city this time of year, you’ll see signs for sugar shacks, where maple sap gets boiled down into syrup and little restaurants pop up to serve pancakes, corn fritters, cider donuts, and dill pickles (to cut through the sweetness of the fresh syrup).
February 28, 2023
You’ve been asking! And finally we can announce: sunchokes are here, starting tomorrow, 3/1. Thanks to Pete’s Greens in VT for getting us local sunchokes. At breakfast we’ll be making The Sunchoke Truffle: fluffy house-baked pita, creamy truffled butter, caramelized onions, a 6.5 minute egg, and thin, crispy sunchoke slices. At lunch and dinner: The Sunchoke Mushroom: scallion-black-pepper mayo, fresh arugula, roasted crimini mushrooms, fried brined onions, and roasted sunchokes. But what IS a sunchoke?